Albert is able to predict with absolute certainty that we would make a decision that we would regret, but it unable to communicate the justification for that certainty? That is wildly inconsistent.

That it hasn't been radically triumphant isn't strong evidence towards its lack of world-beating potential though. Pragmatism is weird and confusing, perhaps it just hasn't been exposited or argued for clearly and convincingly enough. Perhaps it historically has been rejected for cultural reasons ("we're doing physicalism so nyah"). I think there is value on clearly presenting it to the LW/MIRI crowd. There are unresolved problems with a naturalistic philosophy that should be pointed out, and it seems that pragmatism solves them.

As for originality, I'm not sure how think about this. Pretty much everything has already been thought of, but it is hard to read all of the literature to be familiar with it. So how do you write? Acknowledge that there probably is some similar exposition, but we don't know where it is? What if you've come up with most of these ideas yourself? What if every fragment of your idea has been thought of, but it has never been put together in this particular way (which I suspect is going to be the case with us). The only reason for not appearing to be original is so not to seem arrogant to people like you who've read these arguments before.

Do you have direct, object-level criticisms of our version of pragmatism? Because that would be great. We've been having a hard time finding ones that we haven't already fixed, and it seems really unlikely that there aren't any. (I've been working on this with OP)

Pragmatists from Pierce through the positivists to Rorty have agreed with you that the goal is to avoid wasting time on theories of truth and meaning and instead focus on finding practical tools; they've only spoken of theories of truth when they thought there was was no other way to make their points understandable to those too firmly entrenched in the philosophical mainstream (or, even more often, had such theories attributed to them by people who assumed that must be what they were up to despite their explicit disavowals). I'm not saying all of those people agreed with you about everything (the positivists, for example, thought the fact/value distinction was a useful tool, although of course they didn't think it represented any fundamental truth about reality), but I think you greatly exaggerate your originality here. Of course, one might reasonably insist that originality is not as important as whether the theories actually are useful, but while I tend to be in sympathy with the pragmatist tradition, the fact that it has been around for quite a while without seeming to have radically triumphed over all rivals does provide some reason for doubt about the extent of its world-beating potential.

There is a common idea in the “critical thinking”/"traditional rationality" community that (roughly) you should, when exposed to an argument, either identify a problem with it or come to believe the argument’s conclusion. From a Bayesian framework, however, this idea seems clearly flawed. When presented with an argument for a certain conclusion, my failure to spot a flaw in the argument might be explained by either the argument’s being sound or by my inability to identify flawed arguments. So the degree to which I should update in either direction depends on my corresponding prior beliefs. In particular, if I have independent evidence that the argument’s conclusion is false and that my skills for detecting flaws in arguments are imperfect, it seems perfectly legitimate to say, “Look, your argument appears sound to me, but given what I know, both about the matter at hand and about my own cognitive abilities, it is much more likely that there’s a flaw in your argument which I cannot detect than that its conclusion is true.” Yet it is extremely rare to see LW folk or other rationalists say things like this. Why is this so?

I think you're exaggerating. The amount of references he makes to publications in philosophy, social science, science and history suggests he was aware of a big chunk of the literature relevant to his interests.

Still, I'm interested in hearing some criticisms in more detail. Where specifically does he rely on straw man arguments?

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. Very famous book, and worthy of its reputation by the looks of things. About halfway through at the moment. Something I did not know before reading the preface was that Kuhn was a grad student in theoretical physics.

Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning and Discovery by Holland et al. This is a collaborative interdisciplinary work that straddles computer science, psychology and philosophy of science. It's almost 30 years old now, but I still found that I gained some perspective by reading it. One of its most important arguments is that induction should be viewed as a pragmatic rather than syntactic process, i.e. you won't get a working theory of induction without putting a spotlight on agents' goals and how they influence the hypothesis space and categorisations of the agent.

The biggest problem is that twins raised apart are actually pretty rare, so almost any study of them goes to desperate lengths to just get enough of them for the study. This often involves fudging what they're willing to accept as "raised apart" to a degree no unbiased observer would be comfortable with, just to get sufficient numbers.

So I normally defend the "trust the experts" position, and I went to grad school for philosophy, but... I think philosophy may be an area where "trust the experts" mostly doesn't work, simply because with a few exceptions the experts don't agree on anything. (Fuller explanation, with caveats, here.)

I'm pretty sure I was also a victim, if a rather recent and relatively small scale one, and I'm glad to see something was done. However much I told myself it wasn't really important, that karma's a horribly noisy measure, with a few slightly funny comments gaining me the majority of my karma while my most thoughtful contributions usually only gathered a handful, the block downvoting really did make me feel disinclined to post new comments. Banning seems like an extreme measure, and I guess I can see where people who think there should have been warnings are coming from, but I'm actually kind of surprised that it was all or nearly all one person, and given the amount of distress it seems to have caused, I think we can do without a person like that around here, even if he did sometimes contribute good comments.

The reviews are fairly critical. Anything in the book that struck you as particularly compelling? What do you think about the discussion of the A vs. B theory debate, or was there another issue you thought she discussed in a particularly interesting way?