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khafra comments on Less Wrong: Open Thread, September 2010 - Less Wrong
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To be fair, "reductionism is experimentally wrong" is a statement that would raise some argument among Nobel laureates as well.
Argument from some Nobelists. But agreement from others. Google on the string "Philip Anderson reductionism emergence" to get some understanding of what the argument is about.
My feeling is that everyone in this debate is correct, including Eliezer, except for one thing - you have to realize that different people use the words "reductionism" and "emergence" differently. And the way Eliezer defines them is definitely different from the way the words are used (by Anderson, for example) in condensed matter physics.
If the first hit is a fair overview, I can see why you're saying it's a confusion in terms; the only outright error I saw was confusing "derivable" with "trivially derivable."
If you're saying that nobody important really tries to explain things by just saying "emergence" and handwaving the details, like EY has suggested, you may be right. I can't recall seeing it.
Of course, I don't think Eliezer (or any other reductionist) has said that throwing away information so you can use simpler math isn't useful when you're using limited computational power to understand systems which would be intractable from a quantum perspective, like everything we deal with in real life.