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Emile comments on Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate - Less Wrong
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Does it really signal that to other readers, or is that just in your mind? If you see someone posting an agreement, do you really judge him as a weak-minded sycophant?
If they post just a "Amazing post, as usual Eliezer" without further informative contribution, then I too get this mild sense of "sucking up" going on.
Actually, this whole blog (as well as Overcoming Bias) does have this subtle aura of "Eliezer is the rationality God that we should all worship". I don't blame EY for this; more probably, people are just naturally (evolutionarily?) inclined to religious behaviour, and if you hang around LW and OB, then you might project towards the person who acts like the alpha-male of the pack. In fact, it might not even need to have any religious undertones to it. It could just be "alpha-male mammalian evolution society" stuff.
Eliezer is a very smart person. Certainly much smarter than me. But so is Robin Hanson. (I won't get into which one is "smarter", as they are both at least two levels above me) and I feel he is often-- "under-appreciated" perhaps is the closest word?-- perhaps because he doesn't posts as often, but perhaps also because people tend to "me too" Eliezer a lot more often than they "me too" Robin (but again this might be because EY posts much more frequently than RH).
It's simpler than that: 1) Eliezer expresses certainty more often than Robin, and 2) he self-discloses to a greater degree. The combination of the two induces tendency to identification and aspiration. (The evolutionary reasons for this are left as an exercise for the reader.)
Please note that this isn't a denigration -- I do exactly the same things in my own writing, and I also identify with and admire Eliezer. Just knowing what causes it doesn't make the effect go away.
(To a certain extent, it's just audience-selection -- expressing your opinions and personality clearly will make people who agree/like what they hear become followers, those who disagree/dislike become trolls, and those who don't care one way or the other just go away altogether. NOT expressing these things clearly, on the other hand, produces less emotion either way. I love the information I get from Robin's posts, but they don't cause me to feel the same degree of personal connection to their author.)
"If you see someone posting an agreement, do you really judge him as a weak-minded sycophant?"
It depends greatly on what they're agreeing with, and what they've said and done before.