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AnnaSalamon comments on Goals for which Less Wrong does (and doesn't) help - Less Wrong
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There are some distinctions to be made here. Cryonics obviously provides a better chance to see the future after dying than rotting six feet under. Regarding retirement investment, just ask your parents or grandparents. Yet this argument against the necessity of empirical data breaks down at some point. Shaping the Singularity is not on par with having a positive impact on the distant poor. If you claim that predictions and falsifiability are unrelated concepts, that's fine. But to believe some predictions - e.g. a technological Singularity spawned by AGI-seeds capable of superhuman recursive self-improvement - compared to other predictions - e.g. a retirement plan for old age - is not the same.
How should I interpret the above quote? If someone has to be able to follow the advanced arguments on Less Wrong to understand that an advanced education is disadvantageous yet necessary to understand this in the first place, how does Less Wrong help in deciding what to do? This is just an example of what I experience regarding Less Wrong. I'm unable to follow much of Less Wrong yet I'm told that it can help me decide what to do.
The basic problem here is that the necessary education to follow Less Wrong will not only teach me to be wary of the arguments on Less Wrong but will also preclude me to act on the suggestions. How so? The main consensus here seems to be Cryonics and the dangers of AGI research. If it isn't, then at least the top rationalist on Less Wrong isn't as rational as suggested which undermines the whole intention of the original post. So I'll right now assume that those two conclusions are the most important you can arrive at by learning from Less Wrong. Consequentially this means that someone like me should care to earn enough money to support friendly AI research and to buy a Cryonics contract. But this is directly opposed to what I would have to do to to arrive at those conclusions and be reasonable sure about their correctness. Amongst other things I would have to study which would not allow me to earn enough money for many years.
Yes, but it is less obvious that the chance is large enough to be worth the money.
My example was that the type of investments that can be relied upon in coming decades is not accessible that way. For example, many in the US trusted their savings in real estate, which had been trustworthy for generations. And then it wasn’t.
Yes, there is a difference of degree between the difficulty of figuring out whether mortage-backed securities were as trustworthy as people thought (note that this was less obvious beforehand) and the difficulty of thinking non-nonsensically about the impacts of AI on our future. Nonetheless, they both seem sufficiently difficult that their practice is helped by the explicit study of rationality (so that e.g. heuristics and biases, and probability theory, are explicitly studied by many in finance).
What I said was rather meant to show that there are obvious reasons for which you might want to care about your retirement plan. What's very different is to predict that you shouldn't care about your retirement plan because either we'll be killed by superhuman AGI or join utopia as immortals. Less Wrong seems to be focused on the predictive nature of probability theory and to take ideas serious. I don't think that this is a good approach for any but the most intelligent and educated individuals and organisations. The traditional approach to rely on empirical data and the judgement of experts is to be favored for most people in my opinion.
It is interesting to note that the latter is actually a form of the former, and a particularly strong one at that! In fact, the reasoning that you are using here is using the predictive nature of probability theory.
(That said, I agree that for most people biting the bullet when it comes to their abstract cognitions would be disastrous. Explotions, martyrs and deaths by stoning would abound. That and people would actually act on terrible dating advice rather than their instincts.)