First, this seems like a necessary stepping stone toward any kind of FAI-related work, and so cannot be skipped.
It's one stepping-stone to FAI work, but other things could be substituted for it, like publishing lots and lots of well-received peer-reviewed papers.
Anyway, this limited-scope project (consistently ordering people by rationality level in a specific setting) should be something rather uncontroversial and achievable.
I don't think it is. What exactly is "rationality level," and how would it be measured? There's no well-defined quantity that you can scan and get a measure of someone's rationality. Even "winning" isn't that good of a metric.
What exactly is "rationality level," and how would it be measured?
This is a harder question than "which one of two given behaviors is more rational in a given setting?", that's why I suggested starting with the latter. Once you accumulate enough answers like that, you can start assembling them into a more general metric.
I was wondering - what fraction of people here agree with Holden's advice regarding donations, and his arguments? What fraction assumes there is a good chance he is essentially correct? What fraction finds it necessary to determine whenever Holden is essentially correct in his assessment, before working on counter argumentation, acknowledging that such investigation should be able to result in dissolution or suspension of SI?
It would seem to me, from the response, that the chosen course of action is to try to improve the presentation of the argument, rather than to try to verify truth values of the assertions (with the non-negligible likelihood of assertions being found false instead). This strikes me as very odd stance.
Ultimately: why SI seems certain that it has badly presented some valid reasoning, rather than tried to present some invalid reasoning?
edit: I am interested in knowing why people agree/disagree with Holden, and what likehood they give to him being essentially correct, rather than a number or a ratio (that would be subject to selection bias).