satt comments on 2011 Survey Results - Less Wrong

94 Post author: Yvain 05 December 2011 10:49AM

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Comment author: XiXiDu 05 December 2011 09:46:13AM *  25 points [-]

This made my trust in the community and my judgement of its average quality go down a LOT...

I expected almost everyone to agree with Eliezer on most important things...

Alicorn (top-poster) doesn't agree with Eliezer about ethics. PhilGoetz (top-poster) doesn't agree with Eliezer. Wei_Dai (top-poster) doesn't agree with Eliezer on AI issues. wedrifid (top-poster) doesn't agree with Eliezer on CEV and the interpretation of some game and decision theoretic thought experiments.

I am pretty sure Yvain doesn't agree with Eliezer on quite a few things too (too lazy to look it up now).

Generally there are a lot of top-notch people who don't agree with Eliezer. Robin Hanson for example. But also others who have read all of the Sequences, like Holden Karnofsky from GiveWell, John Baez or Katja Grace who has been a visiting fellow.

But even Rolf Nelson (a major donor and well-read Bayesian) disagrees about the Amanda Knox trial. Or take Peter Thiel (SI's top donor) who thinks that the Seasteading Institute deserves more money than the Singularity Institute.

Comment author: Armok_GoB 05 December 2011 02:49:18PM 11 points [-]

I am extremely surprised by this, and very confused. This is strange because I technically knew each of those individual examples... I'm not sure what's going on, but I'm sure that whatever it is it's my fault and extremely unflattering to my ability as a rationalist.

How am I supposed to follow my consensus-trusting heuristics when no consensus exists? I'm to lazy to form my own opinions! :p

Comment author: satt 06 December 2011 03:08:09AM 2 points [-]

This is strange because I technically knew each of those individual examples... I'm not sure what's going on,

Sounds like plain old accidental compartmentalization. You didn't join the dots until someone else pointed out they made a line. (Admittedly this is just a description of your surprise and not an explanation, but hopefully slapping a familiar label on it makes it less opaque.)