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Peterdjones comments on Eliezer's Sequences and Mainstream Academia - Less Wrong
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I don't think there's much value in pretending that issues like God (and the absence thereof) or the compatibility between determinism and (any logically coherent view of) free will haven't been decisively answered.
Seriously now, the compatibility between free will and determinism is something that I was figuring out by myself back in junior high. Eliezer with his "Thou Art Physics" expressed it better and more compactly than I ever did to myself (I was instead using imagery of the style "we're the stories that write themselves", and this was largely inspired by Tolkien's Ainulindale, where the various gods sing a creation song that predicts all their future behaviour), but the gist is really obvious once you get rid of the assumption that determinism and free will must somehow be opposed.
In every discussion I've had since, in any forum, nobody who thinks them to be incompatible can describe even vaguely what "free will" would be supposed to look like if it does not contain determinism inside it.
There are plenty of reasons for putting forward you conclusions as non decisive: (edited)
Not sounding as though you are suffering from the Dunning Kruger effect
Academic Modesty.
You might actually be wrong. No one who calls themselves a rationalist should confuse "Seems true to me" with "is true".
Are those separate points?
I 'might' also be wrong about the Earth not being flat. That still doesn't mean that we shouldn't consider the shape of the earth decisively answered.
They may overlap. Are they bad points?
The pertinent point is that all informed opinion considers it decisiley answered. That is not the case with the two issues you cited as having been decisevly answered by EY.
They're insufficient for me. Other people may find them sufficient.
So, according to you, it seems I shouldn't pronounce something decisively answered unless "all informed opinion" considers it decisively answered.
Don't you see the paradox in this? How is the first person to consider it 'decisively answered' supposed to call it 'decisively answered', if he/she must first wait for all other people to call it 'decisively answered' first?
No they needn't. They only need wait for the point to be reached where an overwhelming majority agree with an answer. Having noted that , they can correctly state that it has been decisevely answered. They only need others to agree with the anwer, not for others to agree that the question has been decisvely answered.
I don't think that "decisively answered" need have anything to do with democracy -- for example I'm sure that if you poll Czech scientists about the existence of God, you'll get a different distribution than if you ask Iranian scientists. Even if they're equally informed, political considerations will make them voice different things.
The policy you suggest seems designed to minimize conflict with your academic peers, not designed to maximize effectiveness in the pursuit of understanding the universe.
Churchill said democracy was the worst system apart from all the others. Do you have an alternative way of establishing Deciiveness that improves on the Majority of Informed Opinion?
Neither of those subsets would get me the majority of informed opinion. I believe I have already solved that problem.
Churchill's exact quote was "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" He was talking about forms of government, not methods of understanding the universe.
As a sidenote, let me note here that even on the issue you argued about, this "majority" seems to actually exist. The majority of philosophers are compatibilists, according to Thrasymachus's linked poll above.
And there seems to be an > 80% percentage (an overwhelming majority) against libertarian free will. According to your own argument then, even if you don't find compabilism a "decisive answer", you should find libertarianism a "decisive failure of an answer".
But getting back to your question: "Do you have an alternative way of establishing Deciiveness that improves on the Majority of Informed Opinion?"
Well, even if we don't speak about things like "Science" or "Testing" or "Occam's Razor properly utilized", I think I'll prefer the "Majority of Informed Opinion that Also Has IQ > 130 And Also One-Boxes in Newcomb's Dilemma".
I was only drawing a loose analogy.
Then Hobbes decisively solved it, not EY. OTOH, if you are talking about EY's specific form of compatibilism.. then he has no majority on his side.
Why is it an improvment to make it parochial? Can't you see that it trivialises the claim "EY has decisevely solved FW" to add the rider "..by the LW/EY definition of decisivness". I could also claim to have solved it by my definition. Parochialism devalues the currency.