Thanks for pulling that up. I tried reading through the entire post, but I became confused at several points. Might be because I haven't read the previous posts in that particular series. Or maybe I'm just overly tired. I'll take another crack at it tomorrow.
From what you quoted, I do have to positively update my degree of belief in the "Eliezer is a mathematical Platonist" hypothesis. It's weak-medium evidence, but still evidence. I think much stronger evidence would be if he actually identified as a math realist. If he said, "Hey guys, I believe the natural numbers exist in a mind-independent, non-spatiotemporal way." and proceeded to explain how to meshes well with reductionism, naturalism, etc.
If someone at in contact with him sees this and could ask him for me, that'd be awesome.
This quote from the post Beautiful Math seems to take a position of "math is in part pre-existing (at least those that involve physics) but Platonia write large is illusionary." It's written in 2008 and EY doesn't seem to have changed his mind in the interim.
Stars are mine. EDIT: Erm Italics. Damn sorta reddit markup while also having some differences!
http://lesswrong.com/lw/mq/beautiful_math/:
"The joy of mathematics is inventing mathematical objects, and then noticing that the mathematical objects that you just created have all sorts of w...
I recognize the title could be more informative. At the same time I believe it says what is important.
I believe in a deity, I believe in mathematical entities in the same way.
The community of LessWrong (from whenceforth: LessWrong) is deeply interesting to me, appearing as a semi-organized atheist, reductionist community.
LessWrong seems very interested in promoting rationality, which I applaud. The effort does seem scattered, though, and this is the reason I post.
One has Eliezer's website with some interesting posts. The same of this community. The community links to some posts when you are coming for the first time into it, and you also have a filter for top posts. One has the blog. And recently, the center for modern rationality (in the same page as harrypoter fanfiction about rationality).
The point being there is no defined roadmap to go from AIC (average irrational chump to make an analogy to Game - which also seems to come up around quite a bit) to RA (again, rationality artist).
I write this post as to maybe generate a discussion on how the efforts could be concentrated and a new direction taken.
Should the creation of the Center for Modern Rationality envision this same concentration, this post may and should be disregard.
If it does not, then I leave it to your consideration.
Hang.