Will_Newsome comments on A Rationalist's Tale - Less Wrong

82 Post author: lukeprog 28 September 2011 01:17AM

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Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 11 September 2011 08:34:09AM *  19 points [-]

Have I ever claimed to have any "theories"? I claim to have skills. I have expounded on what some of these skills are at various points.

This certainly sounds like a theory, or a bunch of them, to me:

Ultimately I think that academic "the form of the good and the form of being are the same" theism is a less naive perspective on cosmology-morality than atheism is---you personally should expect to be at equilibrium with respect to any timeless interaction that ends up at-least-partially-defining what "right" is, and pretending like you aren't or are only negligibly watched over by a superintelligence---whether a demiurge, a pantheonic economy, a monolithic God, or any other kind of institution---is like asking to fail the predictable retrospective stupidity test. The actual decision theory is more nuanced---you always want to be on the edge of uncertainty, you don't want to prop up needlessly suboptimal institutions or decision policies even timelessly, &c.---but pragmatically speaking this gets swamped by the huge amount of moral uncertainty that we have to deal with until our decision theories are better equipped to deal with such issues.

Certainly you keep saying that you feel superior to LW:ers because they don't know the things you do. You may call that knowledge, theory, skill, or just claims, however you prefer. But while you have expounded on it somewhat, you haven't written anything that would try to systematically bridge the inferential distance. Right now, the problem isn't even that we wouldn't understand your reasons for saying what you do, the problem is that we don't understand what you are saying. Mostly it just comes off as an incomprehensible barrage of fancy words.

For instance, my current understanding of your theories (or skills, or knowledge, or whatever) is the following. One, you claim that because of the simulation argument, theism isn't really an unreasonably privileged claim. Two, this relates to TDT somehow. Three, that's about all I understand. And based on your posting history that's about all that the average LW reader could be expected to know about the things you're talking about.

That's what my claim of you making yourself immune to criticism is based on: you currently cannot be criticized, because nobody understands your claims well enough to criticize them (or for that matter, agree with them), and you don't seem to be making any real attempt to change this.

In other words, what you're saying sounds very reasonable, but are you talking about reality or instead a simplified model of the situation that is easy to write a nice-sounding analysis of?

I'm talking about my current best model of you and your claims, which may certainly be flawed. But note that I'm already giving you an extra benefit of doubt because you seemed sane and cool when we interacted iRL. I do still think that you might be on to something reasonable, and I'm putting some effort into communicating with you and inspecting my model for flaws. If I didn't know you at all, I might already have dismissed you as a Time Cube crank.