= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
CronoDAS comments on Mandatory Secret Identities - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (177)
But the fact that reality doesn't disentangle this way, is in a sense the whole point - it's not a coincidence that things are the way they are.
If we get far enough to have external real-world standards like those you're describing, then yes we can toss the "secret identity" thing out the window, so long as we don't have the problem of most good students wanting only to become rationality instructors themselves as opposed to going into other careers (but a teacher who raised their students this way would suffer on the 'accomplished students' metric, etc.). But on the other hand I still suspect that the instructors with secret identities would be revealed to do better.
I've never seen anything from Eliezer that proves that he's done anything at all of value except be a rationality teacher. I know of two general criteria by which to judge someone's output in a field that I am not a part of:
1) Academic prestige (degrees, publications, etc.) and 2) Economic output (making things that people will pay money for).
Eliezer's institution doesn't sell anything, so he's a loss on part 2. He doesn't have a Ph.D or any academic papers I can find, so he's a loss on part 1, as well. Can SIAI demonstrate that it's done anything except beg for money, put up a nice-looking website, organize some symposiums, and write some very good essays?
To be honest, I'd say that his output matches the job description of "philosopher" than "engineer" or "scientist". Not that there's anything wrong with that. Many works that fall broadly under the metric of philosophy have been tremendously influential. For example, Adam Smith was a philosopher.
Eliezer seems to have talents both for seeing through confusion (and its cousin, bullshit) and for being able to explain complicated things in ways that people can understand. In other words, he'd be an amazing university professor. I just haven't seen him prove that he can do anything else.
Yes - in fact, the only thing that leads me to suspect that EY and SIAI are doing anything worth doing is the quality of EY's writings on rationality.
EY has a lengthy article in this volume if that counts as academic.
As has been said, being a theoretician seems distinct enough from teaching that it should count as a day job. I still view Eliezer as more of a teacher than a theoretician, but I don't think Eliezer is saying teachers don't have to be completely divorced from their subject in their day job to avoid affective death spirals.