Nicholas comments on My Strange Beliefs - Less Wrong

17 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 December 2007 12:15PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (51)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Nicholas 30 December 2007 02:03:08PM 5 points [-]

Re: people accusing you of bias. I offer this likely irrelevant observation: I think it's the tone of the blog. Although you do an amazing job of explaining very complicated things to us cretins, it is seems to be that the feeling here is that you are speaking to the plebs from a very great hight inded (which is true, I am guessing). However, being the simple apes that we are, its easy to get upset and accuse you of hypocrisy.

Other blogs written by other extremely smart people (possibly even smarter people, if that's possible)do not induce this feeling in me (and therefore possibly others)so perhaps that's something you need to work on. Also, regarding the issue of cryonics etc., I also find it pretty distracting. For much the same reason as you warn against bringing contemporary politics into these sorts of discussions (i.e. of the biases themselves), it gets my feelings worked up, and it detracts from thinking about the actual biases.

Also, I get the feeling (again, probably wrongly) that you sort of think that people are biased/irrational if you don't agree with these somewhat unusual proposals. Now this is not suprising I guess, it is common Utilitarian/Economic argument that 'well you accept P, but this, you may not realise, actually also implies Q' (some counter-intutive moral point) (actually Bostrom's reversal test paper is another good example). While this is often a powerful form of argument, as the likes of Singer show, it often seems to make one feel a bit manipulated. But again, maybe that's just me. Please don't take these as slams, I'm just reporting my reactions as an attempt to explain what other people are saying & hopefully help improve things. I think it is a pretty damn interesting blog and the level of disucssion is amazingly high, but like everything it could be better.

PS The Walking out on your lonesome from the conference thing was a good point, but the way you illustrated it was a tad self-aggradizing, I think.