I intended Leveling Up in Rationality to communicate this:
Despite worries that extreme rationality isn't that great, I think there's reason to hope that it can be great if some other causal factors are flipped the right way (e.g. mastery over akrasia). Here are some detailed examples I can share because they're from my own life...
But some people seem to have read it and heard this instead:
I'm super-awesome. Don't you wish you were more like me? Yay rationality!
This failure (on my part) fits into a larger pattern of the Singularity Institute seeming too arrogant and (perhaps) being too arrogant. As one friend recently told me:
At least among Caltech undergrads and academic mathematicians, it's taboo to toot your own horn. In these worlds, one's achievements speak for themselves, so whether one is a Fields Medalist or a failure, one gains status purely passively, and must appear not to care about being smart or accomplished. I think because you and Eliezer don't have formal technical training, you don't instinctively grasp this taboo. Thus Eliezer's claim of world-class mathematical ability, in combination with his lack of technical publications, make it hard for a mathematician to take him seriously, because his social stance doesn't pattern-match to anything good. Eliezer's arrogance as evidence of technical cluelessness, was one of the reasons I didn't donate until I met [someone at SI in person]. So for instance, your boast that at SI discussions "everyone at the table knows and applies an insane amount of all the major sciences" would make any Caltech undergrad roll their eyes; your standard of an "insane amount" seems to be relative to the general population, not relative to actual scientists. And posting a list of powers you've acquired doesn't make anyone any more impressed than they already were, and isn't a high-status move.
So, I have a few questions:
- What are the most egregious examples of SI's arrogance?
- On which subjects and in which ways is SI too arrogant? Are there subjects and ways in which SI isn't arrogant enough?
- What should SI do about this?
I think Eli as being the main representative of SI, should be more careful of how he does things, and resist his natural instinct to declare people stupid (-> Especially <- if he's basically right)
Case in point: http://www.sl4.org/archive/0608/15895.html That could have been handled more politically and with more face-saving for the victim. Now you have this guy and at least one "friend" with loads of free time going around putting down anything associated with Eliezer or SI on the Internet. For 5 minutes of extra thinking and not typing this could have been largely avoided. Eli has to realize that he's in a good position to needlessly hurt his (and our) own causes.
Another case in point was handling the Roko affair. There is doing the right thing, but you can do it without being an asshole (also IMO the "ownership" of LW policies is still an unresolved issue, but at least it's mostly "between friends"). If something like this needs to be done Eli needs to pass the keyboard to cooler heads.
Note: happened five years ago