If you would pay attention, Oscar wrote
Eliezer uses "Traditional Rationality" to mean something like "Rationality, as practised by scientists everywhere, especially the ones who read Feynman and Popper".
which is why Brian took it to be about Popper and also Feynman
Oscar said that scientists who read Popper did certain things.
Brian wrote 400 arguing that Popper did not do those things, unless he was assuming that Popper fell into the category of "scientists who had read Popper."
This in no way contradicted anything that Oscar wrote.
Just because someone mentions a noun in their text does not mean they're writing about that noun. You seem to be suffering from the halo effect; interpreting any negative sentence that mentions Popper as an attack on Popper. Consider; what are the odds that it would be you who wou...
In several places in the sequences, Eliezer writes condescendingly about "Traditional Rationality". The impression given is that Traditional Rationality was OK in its day, but that today we have better varieties of rationality available.
That is fine, except that it is unclear to me just what the traditional kind of rationality included, and it is also unclear just what it failed to include. In one essay, Eliezer seems to be saying that Traditional Rationality was too concerned with process, whereas it should have been concerned with winning. In other passages, it seems that the missing ingredient in the traditional version was Bayesianism (a la Jaynes). Or sometimes, the missing ingredient seems to be an understanding of biases (a la Kahneman and Tversky).
In this essay, Eliezer laments that being a traditional rationalist was not enough to keep him from devising a Mysterious Answer to a mysterious question. That puzzles me because I would have thought that traditional ideas from Peirce, Popper, and Korzybski would have been sufficient to avoid that error. So apparently I fail to understand either what a Mysterious Answer is or just how weak the traditional form of rationality actually is.
Can anyone help to clarify this? By "Traditional Rationality", does Eliezer mean to designate a particular collection of ideas, or does he use it more loosely to indicate any thinking that is not quite up to his level?