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?
The question is one of credibility rather than capability. In private, public, academic and voluntary sectors it's a fairly standard assumption that if you want people to give you resources, you have to do a little dance to earn it. Yes, it's wasteful and stupid and inefficient, but it's generally easier to do the little dance than convince people that the little dance is a stupid system. They know that already.
It's not arrogant to say "my time is too precious to do a little dance", and it may even be true. The arrogance would be to expect people to give you those resources without the little dance. I doubt the folk at SIAI expect this to happen, but I do suspect they're probably quite tired of being asked to dance.
The little dance is not wasteful and stupid and inefficient. For each individual with the ability to provide resources (be they money, manpower, or exposure), there are a thousand projects who would love to be the beneficiaries of said resources. Challenging the applicants to produce some standardised signals of competence is a vastly more efficient approach than expecting the benefactors to be able to thoroughly analyse each and every applicant's exoteric efforts.