He's tried, or he wouldn't have had the material to make those posts.
I appreciate your comments, and they're a good counterpoint to EY's point of view. But the fact that you need to make an assumption in order to be an effective teacher, because it's true most of the time, doesn't mean it's always true. You are making an expected-value calculation as a teacher, perhaps subconsciously:
You are also taking EY's claim that not every technique works well for every person, and caricaturing it as the claim that there is a 1-1 correspondence between people and techniques that work for them. He never said that.
The specific comments Eliezer has made, about people erroneously assuming that what worked for them should work for other people, were taken from real life and were, I think, also true and correct. In order to convince me that those specific examples were wrong, you would have to address those specific examples in detail and make a strong case why they were not really as he described them. I would rather see you narrow your claims to something reasonable than make these erroneous blanket denunciations, because they distract from the valuable things you have to say.
You don't need to duke it out with EY over who's the alpha teacher. :)
You are making an expected-value calculation as a teacher, perhaps subconsciously
No. I'm making the assumption that, until someone has actually tried something, they aren't in a position to say whether or not it works. Once someone has actually tried something, and it doesn't work, then I find something else for them to do. I don't give up and say, "oh, well I guess that doesn't work for you, then."
When I do a one-on-one consult, I don't charge someone until and unless they get the result we agree on as a "success" for that consul...
Reply to: Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories
Inspired by what looks like a very damaging reticence to embrace and share brain hacks that might only work for some of us, but are not backed by Deep Theories. In support of tinkering with brain hacks and self experimentation where deep science and large trials are not available.
Eliezer has suggested that, before he will try a new anti-akraisia brain hack:
This doesn't look to me like an expected utility calculation, and I think it should. It looks like an attempt to justify why he can't be expected to win yet. It just may be deeply wrongheaded.
I submit that we don't "need" (emphasis in original) this stuff, it'd just be super cool if we could get it. We don't need to know that the next brain hack we try will work, and we don't need to know that it's general enough that it'll work for anyone who tries it; we just need the expected utility of a trial to be higher than that of the other things we could be spending that time on.
So… this isn't other-optimizing, it's a discussion of how to make decisions under uncertainty. What do all of us need to make a rational decision about which brain hacks to try?
(can these books be judged by their covers? how does this chance vary with the type of exposure? what would you need to do to understand enough about a hack that would work to increase its chance of seeming deeply compelling on first exposure?)
… and, what don't we need?
How should we decide how much time to spend gathering data and generating estimates on matters such as this? How much is Eliezer setting himself up to lose, and how much am I missing the point?