Emile comments on I Stand by the Sequences - Less Wrong
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Comments (248)
You seem to mostly disagree in spirit with all Grognor's points but the last, though on that point you didn't share your impression of the H&B literature.
I'll chime in and say that at some point about two years ago I would have more or less agreed with all six points. These days I disagree in spirit with all six points and with the approach to rationality that they represent. I've learned a lot in the meantime, and various people, including Anna Salamon, have said that I seem like I've gained fifteen or twenty IQ points. I've read all of Eliezer's posts maybe three times over and I've read many of the cited papers and a few books, so my disagreement likely doesn't stem from not having sufficiently appreciated Eliezer's sundry cases. Many times when I studied the issues myself and looked at a broader set of opinions in the literature, or looked for justifications of the unstated assumptions I found, I came away feeling stupid for having been confident of Eliezer's position: often Eliezer had very much overstated the case for his positions, and very much ignored or fought straw men of alternative positions.
His arguments and their distorted echoes lead one to think that various people or conclusions are obviously wrong and thus worth ignoring: that philosophers mostly just try to be clever and that their conclusions are worth taking seriously more-or-less only insofar as they mirror or glorify science; that supernaturalism, p-zombie-ism, theism, and other philosophical positions are clearly wrong, absurd, or incoherent; that quantum physicists who don't accept MWI just don't understand Occam's razor or are making some similarly simple error; that normal people are clearly biased in all sorts of ways, and that this has been convincingly demonstrated such that you can easily explain away any popular beliefs if necessary; that religion is bad because it's one of the biggest impediments to a bright, Enlightened future; and so on. It seems to me that many LW folk end up thinking they're right about contentious issues where many people disagree with them, even when they haven't looked at their opponents' best arguments, and even when they don't have a coherent understanding of their opponents' position or their own position. Sometimes they don't even seem to realize that there are important people who disagree with them, like in the case of heuristics and biases. Such unjustified confidence and self-reinforcing ignorance is a glaring, serious, fundamental, and dangerous problem with any epistemology that wishes to lay claim to rationality.
Does anybody actually dispute that?
For what it's worth, I don't hold that position, and it seems much more prevalent in atheist forums than on LessWrong.
Is it less prevalent here or is it simply less vocal because people here aren't spending their time on that particularly tribal demonstration? After all, when you've got Bayesianism, AI risk, and cognitive biases, you have a lot more effective methods of signaling allegiance to this narrow crowd.
Well we have openly religious members of our 'tribe'.
Clear minority, and most comments defending such views are voted down. With the exception of Will, no one in that category is what would probably be classified as high status here, and even Will's status is... complicated.
Well this post is currently at +6.
Also I'm not religious in the seemingly relevant sense.
Depends on what connotations are implied. There are certainly people who dispute, e.g., the (practical relevance of the) H&B results on confirmations bias, overconfidence, and so on that LessWrong often brings up in support of the "the world is mad" narrative. There are also people like Chesterton who placed much faith in the common sense of the average man. But anyway I think the rest of the sentence needs to be included to give that fragment proper context.
Granted.