I don't think the average matters, it's the right tail of the distribution that's important.
Take, say, people with 130+ IQ -- that's about 2.5% of your standard white population and the overwhelming majority of them are not signed up. In fact, in any IQ quantile only a miniscule fraction has signed up.
entirelyuseless made the point that low cryonics use rates in the general population are evidence against the effectiveness of cryonics. James Miller responded by citing evidence supporting cryonics: that cryonicists are disproportionately intelligent/capable/well-informed. If your response to James is just that very few people have signed up for cryonics, then that's restating entirelyuseless' point. "The intellectual quality of some people who have NOT signed up for cryonics is exceptionally high" would be true even in a world where every cryonicist were more intelligent than every non-cryonicist, just given how few cryonicists there are.
Is there a list of Scott Alexander's short stories somewhere?
You can find some here: http://raikoth.net/fiction.html
"What if you see Hanson, Thiel, Kurzweil, and Eliezer in the short line, ask them if you should get in the short line, and they say yes?"
As I pointed at last time you brought this up,these people aren't just famous for being smart, they're also famous for being contrarians and futurists. Cryonics is precisely an area in which you'd expect them to make a bad bet, because it's seen as weird and it's futuristic.
This depends on whether you model contrarianism and futurism as a bias ('Hanson is especially untrustworthy about futurist topics, since he works in the area') v. modeling contrarianism and futurism as skills one can train or bodies of knowledge one can learn ('Hanson is especially trustworthy about futurist topics, since he works in the area').
But the intellectual quality of some of the people who have signed up for cryonics is exceptionally high
The intellectual quality of some people who have NOT signed up for cryonics is exceptionally high as well.
But the average is lower, and not signing up for cryonics is a "default" action: you don't have to expend thought or effort in order to not be signed up for cryonics. A more relevant comparison might be to people who have written refutations or rejections of cryonics.
All right. Someone tell me if this is decent enough, please. I only did the first section: "Rationality and Rationalization".
How I did it:
Created an account at Instapaper and used their bookmarklet individually on each article.
Used calibre to download the articles from Instapaper and convert them to an ebook (instructions here).
Edited the title and other metadata in calibre to make the ebook more relevant and presentable and converted it to epub/mobi formats.
Note that I had to use the Instapaper bookmarklet starting from the last article and going backwards because calibre downloads the articles in reverse chronological order.
I don't think this is ideal, though, because the comment sections of some of these articles are good enough to be included in the reading but Instapaper only retrieves the article post, leaving out everything else. If anyone has a better suggestion, do share :)
Thanks, Ricardo! In MIRI's ebooks, we've tried linking to the comments section at the bottom of each article. Then people can click through to a website featuring the comments if they're interested; but the ebook itself isn't bloated by the size of the comments sections.
Looking forward to seeing the list when it is done.
THANK YOU! Any chance for a brief summary of what each are (kinda like the LW Wiki does)
Scott does tend to make his titles pretty cryptic. I could edit the LW version to include brief descriptions, leaving the version on my blog description-free for people who want a cleaner link list.
How much detail would be ideal? E.g., would 7 words per post be better than 20 words (since it'd be easier to skim such a list and spot quick keywords)?
How does this compare to the other recent compilation of Yvains articles?
Mine is longer: 171 links vs. 111. Mine has more LW and less LJ content.
The lists are mostly independent: I started mine in December 2014. I decided to clean it up and post it now because casebash's version showed there was a lot of demand for something like this, and I wanted a version that was a bit more optimized for new readers to dive in and read straight through.
The two lists overlap quite a bit because so many of Scott's posts are objectively great. I also went through casebash's list and expanded my own list with five items that weren't originally on it: Revenge as Charitable Act, What's in a Name?, Epistemic Learned Helplessness, Approving Reinforces Low-Effort Behaviors, and Schizophrenia and Geomagnetic Storms.
I've put together a list of what I think are the best Yvain (Scott Alexander) posts for new readers, drawing from SlateStarCodex, LessWrong, raikoth.net, and Scott's LiveJournal.
The list should make the most sense to people who start from the top and read through it in order, though skipping around is encouraged too. Rather than making a chronological list, I’ve tried to order things by a mix of "where do I think most people should start reading?" plus "sorting related posts together."
This is a work in progress; you’re invited to suggest things you’d add, remove, or shuffle around. Since many of the titles are a bit cryptic, I'm adding short descriptions. See my blog for a version without the descriptions.
I. Rationality and Rationalization
II. Probabilism
III. Science and Doubt
IV. Medicine, Therapy, and Human Enhancement
V. Introduction to Game Theory
VI. Promises and Principles
VII. Cognition and Association
VIII. Doing Good
IX. Liberty
X. Progress
XI. Social Justice
XII. Politicization
XIII. Competition and Cooperation
If you liked these posts and want more, I suggest browsing the SlateStarCodex archives.
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My typical heuristic for reliable experts (taken from Thinking Fast and Slow I think) is that if experts have tight, reliable feedback loops, they tend to be more trustworthy. Futurism obviously fails this test. Contrarianism isn't really a "field" in itself, and I tend to think of it more as a bias... although EY would obviously disagree.
Then it might be that futurism is irrelevant, rather than being expertise-like or bias-like. (Unless we think 'studying X while lacking tight, reliable feedback loops' in this context is worse than 'neither studying X nor having tight, reliable feedback loops.')
Thiel, Yudkowsky, Hanson, etc. use "contrarian" to mean someone who disagrees with mainstream views. Most contrarians are wrong, though correct contrarians are more impressive than correct conformists (because it's harder to be right about topics where the mainstream is wrong).