There a variety of issues going on here. Manfred pointed out many of them. There's another issue here that is you've had an influx of users all of whom are arguing for essentially the same set of positions and not doing it very well with a bit of rudeness thrown in. One of the three is being particularly egregious, and I suspect that there may be some spill-over in attitude from that user's behavior towards how people are voting about you. I will note that in the threads responding to the various Popperian criticisms, various LW regulars are willing to say when another LWian has said something they think is wrong. It might help to distinguish yourselves if you were willing to point out when you think the others are wrong. For example, you haven't posted at all in this thread. Do you agree with everything he has said there? If you disagree will you say so or do you feel a need to stay silent to protect a fellow member of your tribal group?
For what it is worth, I'm not a Bayesian. I think that Bayesianism has deep problems especially surrounding 1) the difficulty of where priors come from 2) the difficulty of meaningfully making Bayesian estimates about abstract systems. I've voiced those concerns before here, and many of those comments have been voted up. Indeed, I recently started a subthread discussing a problem with the Solomonoff prior approach which has been voted up.
I agree with curi that the Conjunction Fallacy does not exist. But if I disagreed I would say so - Popperians don't hold back from criticism of each other. If my criticism hit its mark, then curi would change his mind and I know that because I participate in Popperian forums that curi participates in. That said, most Popperians I know think along similar lines; I see more disagreement among Bayesians about their philosophy here.
Your thread is about a technical issue and I think Bayesians are more comfortable discussing these sort of things.
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?