• http://appliedrationality.org/2012/11/09/was-nate-silver-the-most-accurate-2012-election-pundit/
• http://www.gwern.net/2012%20election%20predictions

Update: Gwern is working on this with me. The result will be a CFAR blog post.

Mainstream status:

The introduction to causality is intended to be bog-standard. All departures from mainstream academia are errors and should be flagged accordingly.

I can't particularly recall hearing anyone suggest that a universe is a connected fabric of causes and effects in the Pearlian sense of causality. Since Special Relativity there have been many suggestions that a universe is a connected fabric of 'events', or points in spacetime.

I can't particularly recall reading that you can only meaningfully talk about things you can find by tracing causal links (this theory will be developed further in upcoming posts).

It's too bad that these how-to posts tend to be not as popular as the philosophical posts. Good philosophy is important but I doubt it can produce rationalists of the quality that can be produced by consistent rationalist skills-training over months and years.

Any luck so far?

Set a ten-minute timer and make a list of all the things you could do that would make you regret not doing them sooner. And then do those things.

I have a pretty long list like this that I try to look at every day, but I can't post it for the next two weeks for a complicated, boring reason.

BTW, it's important to note that by some polls an actual majority of theoretical physicists now believe in MWI, and this was true well before I wrote anything. My only contributions are in explaining the state of the issue to nonphysicists (I am a good explainer), formalizing the gross probability-theoretic errors of some critiques of MWI (I am a domain expert at that part), and stripping off a lot of soft understatement that many physicists have to do for fear of offending sillier colleagues (i.e., they know how incredibly stupid the Copenhagen interpretation appears nowadays, but will incur professional costs from saying it out loud with corresponding force, because there are many senior physicists who grew up believing it).

The idea that Eliezer Yudkowsky made up the MWI as his personal crackpot interpretation isn't just a straw version of LW, it's disrespectful to Everett, DeWitt, and the other inventors of MWI. It does seem to be a common straw version of LW for all that, presumably because it's spontaneously reinvented any time somebody hears that MWI is popular on LW and they have no idea that MWI is also believed by a plurality and possibly a majority of theoretical physicists and that the Quantum Physics Sequence is just trying to explain why to nonphysicists / formalize the arguments in probability-theoretic terms to show their nonambiguity.

Reviews seem to indicate that the book can and should be condensed into a couple quality insights. Is there any reason to buy the actual book?

I agree that EY is probably overconfident in MWI, although I'm uniformed about QM so I can't say much with confidence. I don't think it's accurate to damn all of Less Wrong because of this. For example, this post questioning the sequence was voted up highly.

I don't think EY claims to have any original insights pointing to MWI. I think he's just claiming that the state of the evidence in physics is such that MWI is obviously correct, and this is evidence as to the irrationality of physicists. I'm not too sure about this myself.

As for why SI's approach is dangerous, I think Holden put it well in the most upvoted post on the site.

Well there have been responses to that point (here's one). I wish you'd be a bit more self-skeptical and actually engage with that (ongoing) debate instead of summarizing your view on it and dismissing LW because it largely disagrees with your view.

You started with an intent to associate SIAI with self delusion

I see, he must be one of those innately evil enemies of ours, eh?

My current model of aaronsw is something like this: He's a fairly rational person who's a fan of Givewell. He's read about SI and thinks the singularity is woo, but he's self-skeptical enough to start reading SI's website. He finds a question in their FAQ where they fail to address points made by those who disagree, reinforcing the woo impression. At this point he could just say "yeah, they're woo like I thought". But he's heard they run a blog on rationality, so he makes a post pointing out the self-skepticism failure in case there's something he's missing.

The FAQ on the website is not the place to signal humility and argue against your own conclusions.

Why not? I think it's an excellent place to do that. Signalling humility and arguing against your own conclusions is a good way to be taken seriously.

Overall, I thought aaronsw's post had a much higher information to accusations ratio than your comment, for whatever that's worth. As criticism goes his is pretty polite and intelligent.

Also, aaronsw is not the first person I've seen on the internet complaining about lack of self-skepticism on LW, and I agree with him that it's something we could stand to work on. Or at least signalling self-skepticism; it's possible that we're already plenty self-skeptical and all we need to do is project typical self-skeptical attitudes.

For example, Eliezer Yudkowsky seems to think that the rational virtue of "humility" is about "taking specific actions in anticipation of your own errors", not actually acting humble. (Presumably self-skepticism counts as humility by this definition.) But I suspect that observing how humble someone seems is a typical way to gauge the degree to which they take specific actions in anticipation of their own errors. If this is the case, it's best for signalling purposes to actually act humble as well.

(I also suspect that acting humble makes it easier to publicly change your mind, since the status loss for doing so becomes lower. So that's another reason to actually act humble.)

(Yes, I'm aware that I don't always act humble. Unfortunately, acting humble by always using words like "I suspect" everywhere makes my comments harder to read and write. I'm not sure what the best solution to this is.)