Suppose you separate the Sequences into "original" and "unoriginal".
The "unoriginal" segment is very likely to be true: agreeing with all of it is fairly straightforward, and disagreeing with all of it is ridiculously extreme.
To a first approximation, we can say that the middle-ground stance on any given point in the "original" statement is uncertainty. That is, accepting that point and rejecting it are equally extreme. If we use the general population for reference, of course, that is nowhere near correct: even considering the possibility that cryonics might work is a fairly extreme stance, for instance.
But taking the approximation at face value tells us that agreeing with every "original" claim, and disagreeing with every "original" claim, are equally extreme positions. If we now add the further stipulation that both positions agree with every "unoriginal" claim, they both move slightly toward the Sequences, but not by much.
So actually (1) "I agree with everything in the sequences" and (2) "Everything true in the Sequences is unoriginal, everything original in them is false" are roughly equally extreme. If anything, we have made an error in favor of (1). On the other hand, (3) "Everything in the Sequences ever is false" is much more extreme because it also rejects the "unoriginal" claims, each of which is almost certainly true.
P.S. If you are like me, you are wondering about what "extreme" means now. To be extremely technical (ha) I am interpreting it as measuring the probability of a position re: Sequences that you expect a reasonable, boundedly-rational person to have. For instance, a post that says "Confirmation bias is a thing" is un-controversial, and you expect that reasonable people will believe it with probability close to 1. A post that says "MWI is obviously true" is controversial, and if you are generous you will say that there is a probability of 0.5 that someone will agree with it. This might be higher or lower for other posts in the "original" category but on the whole the approximation of 0.5 is probably favorable to the person that agrees with everything.
So when I conclude that (1) and (2) are roughly equally extreme, I am saying that a "reasonable person" is roughly equally likely to end up at either one of them. This is an approximation, of course, but they are certainly both closer to each other than they are to (3).
Yeah, I think I agree with everything here as far as it goes, though I haven't looked at it carefully. I'm not sure originality is as crisp a concept as you want it to be, but I can imagine us both coming up with a list of propositions that we believe captures everything in the Sequences that some reasonable person somewhere might conceivably disagree with, weighted by how reasonable we think a person could be and still disagree with that proposition, and that we'd end up with very similar lists (perhaps with fairly different weights). .
Edit, May 21, 2012: Read this comment by Yvain.
- Peter de Blanc
There's been a lot of talk here lately about how we need better contrarians. I don't agree. I think the Sequences got everything right and I agree with them completely. (This of course makes me a deranged, non-thinking, Eliezer-worshiping fanatic for whom the singularity is a substitute religion. Now that I have admitted this, you don't have to point it out a dozen times in the comments.) Even the controversial things, like:
There are two tiny notes of discord on which I disagree with Eliezer Yudkowsky. One is that I'm not so sure as he is that a rationalist is only made when a person breaks with the world and starts seeing everybody else as crazy, and two is that I don't share his objection to creating conscious entities in the form of an FAI or within an FAI. I could explain, but no one ever discusses these things, and they don't affect any important conclusions. I also think the sequences are badly-organized and you should just read them chronologically instead of trying to lump them into categories and sub-categories, but I digress.
Furthermore, I agree with every essay I've ever read by Yvain, I use "believe whatever gwern believes" as a heuristic/algorithm for generating true beliefs, and don't disagree with anything I've ever seen written by Vladimir Nesov, Kaj Sotala, Luke Muelhauser, komponisto, or even Wei Dai; policy debates should not appear one-sided, so it's good that they don't.
I write this because I'm feeling more and more lonely, in this regard. If you also stand by the sequences, feel free to say that. If you don't, feel free to say that too, but please don't substantiate it. I don't want this thread to be a low-level rehash of tired debates, though it will surely have some of that in spite of my sincerest wishes.
Holden Karnofsky said:
I can't understand this. How could the sequences not be relevant? Half of them were created when Eliezer was thinking about AI problems.
So I say this, hoping others will as well:
I stand by the sequences.
And with that, I tap out. I have found the answer, so I am leaving the conversation.
Even though I am not important here, I don't want you to interpret my silence from now on as indicating compliance.
After some degree of thought and nearly 200 comment replies on this article, I regret writing it. I was insufficiently careful, didn't think enough about how it might alter the social dynamics here, and didn't spend enough time clarifying, especially regarding the third bullet point. I also dearly hope that I have not entrenched anyone's positions, turning them into allied soldiers to be defended, especially not my own. I'm sorry.