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CAE_Jones comments on Open thread, July 16-22, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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There is another video from the same author explaining his opinions on LW. It takes 2 minutes to just start talking about LW, so here are the important parts: ---
The Sequences are hundreds and hundreds of blog posts, written by one man. They are like catechism, teach strange vocabulary like "winning", "paying rent", "mindkilling", "being Bayesian".
The claim that Bayes theorem, which is just a footnote in statistic textbook, has the power to reshape your thinking so that you can maximize the outcomes of your life... has no evidence. You can't simplify the complexity of life into simple probabilities. EY is a high-school dropout and he has no peer-reviewed articles.
People on LW say that criticism of LW is upvoted. Actually, that "criticism" does not disagree with anything -- it just asks MIRI to be more specific. Is that the LW's best defense against accusations of cultishness?
LW community believes in Singularity, which again, has no evidence, and the scientific community does not support it. MIRI asks your money, and does not say how specifically it will be used to save the world.
LW claims that politics is the mindkiller, yet EY admits that he is libertarian. Most of MIRI money comes from Peter Theil -- a right-wing libertarian billionaire.
Roko's basilisk...
...and these guys pretend to be skeptics?
Now let's look at CFAR. They have EY on their board, and they force you to read the Sequences if you want to join them.
Julia Galef is a rising star in the skeptical movement; she has a podcast "Rationally Speaking". But she is connected with LW, she believes in Bayes theorem, and she only criticizes the political left. She is obviously used as a face of LW movement because she is pretty! -- This is a sexism on LW's part, because men at LW agree in comments that Julia is pretty. If they weren't sexist, they would talk about how smart she is.
People like this are not skeptics and should not be invited to Skepticon!
The only point I feel the need to contest is "EY admits he is libertarian". What I remember is EY admitting that he was previously libertarian, then stopped.
Well, and "EY is a high school dropout with no peer reviewed articles", not because it's untrue, but because neither of those is all that important.
The rest is sound criticism, so far as I can tell.
Here is a comment (from 2007) about it:
It could be interpreted as Eliezer no longer being libertarian, but also as Eliezer remaining libertarian, just moving more meta and focusing on more winnable topics.
Sure, but why does it feel (I mean, at least to the author) as important? I guess it is heuristics "if you are not a scientist, and you speak a lot about science, you got it wrong". Which may be generally correct, if people obsessed with science usually become either scientists or pseudoscientists.
The part about Julia didn't sound fair to me -- but perhaps you should see the original, not my interpretation. It starts at 8:50.
Otherwise, yes, he has some good points, he is just very selective about the evidence he considers. I was most impressed by the part about Holden's non-criticism. (More meta, I wonder how he would interpret this agreement with his criticism. Possibly as something unimportant, or something that a cult would do to try appear non-cultish.)
In 2011, he describes himself as a "a very small-‘l’ libertarian” in this essay at Cato Unbound.