BTW, I realized there's something else I agree with you on that's probably worth mentioning:

Eliezer in particular, I think, is indeed overconfident in his ability to reason things out from first principles. For example, I think he was overconfident in AI foom (see especially the bit at the end of that essay). And even if he's calibrated his ability correctly, it's totally possible that others who don't have the intelligence/rationality he does could pick up the "confident reasoning from first principles" meme and it would be detrimental to them.

That said, he's definitely a smart guy and I'd want to do more thinking and research before making a confident judgement. What I said is just my current estimate.

Insofar as I object to your post, I'm objecting to the idea that empiricism is the be-all and end-all of rationality tools. I'm inclined to think that philosophy (as described in Paul Graham's essay) is useful and worth learning about and developing.