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TheAncientGeek comments on Self-Congratulatory Rationalism - Less Wrong
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I question how objective these objective criterion you're talking about are. Usually when we judge someone's intelligence, we aren't actually looking at the results of an IQ test, so that's subjective. Ditto rationality. And if you were really that concerned about education, you'd stop paying so much attention to Eliezer or people who have a bachelors' degree at best and pay more attention to mainstream academics who actually have PhDs.
FWIW, actual heuristics I use to determine who's worth paying attention to are
Which may not be great heuristics, but I'll wager that they're better than IQ (wager, in this case, being a figure of speech, because I don't actually know how you'd adjudicate that bet).
It may be helpful, here, to quote what I hope will be henceforth known as the Litany of Hermione: "The thing that people forget sometimes, is that even though appearances can be misleading, they're usually not."
You've also succeeded in giving me second thoughts about being signed up for cryonics, on the grounds that I failed to consider how it might encourage terrible mental habits in others. For the record, it strikes me as quite possible that mainstream neuroscientists are entirely correct to be dismissive of cryonics—my biggest problem is that I'm fuzzy on what exactly they think about cryonics (more here).
Your heuristics are, in my opinion, too conservative or not strong enough.
Track record of saying reasonable things once again seems to put the burden of decision on your subjective feelings and so rule out paying attention to people you disagree with. If you're a creationist, you can rule out paying attention to Richard Dawkins, because if he's wrong about God existing, about the age of the Earth, and about homosexuality being okay, how can you ever expect him to be right about evolution? If you're anti-transhumanism, you can rule out cryonicists because they tend to say lots of other unreasonable things like that computers will be smarter than humans, or that there can be "intelligence explosions", or that you can upload a human brain.
Status within mainstream academia is a really good heuristic, and this is part of what I mean when I say I use education as a heuristic. Certainly to a first approximation, before investigating a field, you should just automatically believe everything the mainstream academics believe. But then we expect mainstream academia to be wrong in a lot of cases - you bring up the case of mainstream academic philosophy, and although I'm less certain than you are there, I admit I am very skeptical of them. So when we say we need heuristics to find ideas to pay attention to, I'm assuming we've already started by assuming mainstream academia is always right, and we're looking for which challenges to them we should pay attention to. I agree that "challenges the academics themselves take seriously" is a good first step, but I'm not sure that would suffice to discover the critique of mainstream philosophy. And it's very little help at all in fields like politics.
The crackpot warning signs are good (although it's interesting how often basically correct people end up displaying some of them because they get angry at having their ideas rejected and so start acting out, and it also seems like people have a bad habit of being very sensitive to crackpot warning signs the opposing side displays and very obtuse to those their own side displays). But once again, these signs are woefully inadequate. Plantinga doesn't look a bit like a crackpot.
You point out that "Even though appearances can be misleading, they're usually not." I would agree, but suggest you extend this to IQ and rationality. We are so fascinated by the man-bites-dog cases of very intelligent people believing stupid things that it's hard to remember that stupid things are still much, much likelier to be believed by stupid people.
(possible exceptions in politics, but politics is a weird combination of factual and emotive claims, and even the wrong things smart people believe in politics are in my category of "deserve further investigation and charitable treatment".)
You are right that I rarely have the results of an IQ test (or Stanovich's rationality test) in front of me. So when I say I judge people by IQ, I think I mean something like what you mean when you say "a track record of making reasonable statements", except basing "reasonable statements" upon "statements that follow proper logical form and make good arguments" rather than ones I agree with.
So I think it is likely that we both use a basket of heuristics that include education, academic status, estimation of intelligence, estimation of rationality, past track record, crackpot warning signs, and probably some others.
I'm not sure whether we place different emphases on those, or whether we're using about the same basket but still managing to come to different conclusions due to one or both of us being biased.
Has anyone noticed that, given the fact that most of the material on this site is esemtially about philosophy, "academic philosophy sucks" is a Crackpot Warning Sign, ie "don't listen to the hidebound establishment".
So I normally defend the "trust the experts" position, and I went to grad school for philosophy, but... I think philosophy may be an area where "trust the experts" mostly doesn't work, simply because with a few exceptions the experts don't agree on anything. (Fuller explanation, with caveats, here.)
Also, from the same background, it is striking to me that a lot of the criticisms Less Wrong people make of philosophers are the same as the criticisms philosophers make of one another. I can't really think of a case where Less Wrong stakes out positions that are almost universally rejected by mainstream philosophers. And not just because philosophers disagree so much, though that's also true, of course; it seems rather that Less Wrong people greatly exaggerate how different they are and how much they disagree with the philosophical mainstream, to the extent that any such thing exists (again, a respect in which their behavior resembles how philosophers treat one another).
Since there is no consensus among philosophers, respecting philosophy is about respecting the process. The negative .claims LW makes about philosophy are indeed similar to the negative claims philosophy makes about itself. LW also makes the positive claim that it has a better, faster method than philosophy but in fact just has a truncated version of the same method.
As Hallquist notes elsewhere
But Alexander misunderstands me when he says I accuse Yudkowsky “of being against publicizing his work for review or criticism.” He’s willing to publish it–but only to enlighten us lesser rationalists. He doesn’t view it as a necessary part of checking whether his views are actually right. That means rejecting the social process of science. That’s a problem.
Or, as I like to put it, if you half bake your bread, then you get your bread quicker...but its half baked,
If what philosophers specialise in clarifying questions, they can trusted to get the question right.
A typical failure mode of amateur philosophy is to substitute easier questions for harder ones.
You might be interested in this article and this sequence (in particular, the first post of that sequence). "Academic philosophy sucks" is a Crackpot Warning Sign because of the implied brevity. A measured, in-depth criticism is one thing; a smear is another.
Read them ,not generally impressed.