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I am male with Agreeableness probably at least as high as the average female, and that comment annoyed me also. I wouldn't say that such dismissive sarcasm is never deserved, but I don't see how that post came anywhere near deserving it. Eliezer seems to have a short fuse with some individuals, but without knowing the history between them or being interested in digging it up, such comments seem mean-spirited. They may also look like an evasion.
It is an answer short on patience, but it was a comment short on insight. In response to a post relayed in short as: 'The common definition of rationality is stupid. Here is a new proposal that is a basic tenet of most of my writing. (Implicitly, keep this in mind when you see me talk about rationality.)', the poster simply added 'Well, I think the original definition of rationality is right, and I've said this before.'
The inciting comment seems just like the responses (on Fark, HNews, etc.) to Pullum's article about Strunk & White- people who like what they learned flatly deny any counterargument.
In response to
Rationality is Systematized Winning
I guess when I look over the comments, the problem with the phraseology is that people seem to inevitably begin debating over whether rationalists win and asking how much they win - the properties of a fixed sort of creature, the "rationalist" - rather than saying, "What wins systematically? Let us define rationality accordingly."
Not sure what sort of catchphrase would solve this.
It runs into problems elsewhere, but what about "Rationalism should win" ?
In response to
The Least Convenient Possible World
Very good point, and crystalizes some of my thinking on some of the discussion on the tyrant/charity thing.
As far as the specific problems you posed...
For your souped up Pascal's Wager, I admit that one gives me pause. Taking into account the fact that Omega singled out one out of the space of all possible religions, etc etc... Well, the answer isn't obvious to me right now. This flavor would seem to not admit to any of the usual basic refutations of the wager. I think under these circumstances, assuming Omega wasn't open to answering any further questions and wasn't giving any other info, I'd probably at least spend rather more time investigating Catholicism, studying the religion a bit more and really thinking things through.
For question 2 (the really "god shaped" hole) though, personally, while I value happiness, it's not the only thing I value. I'll take truth, thank you very much. (In the spirit of this, I'm assuming there's no psychological trick that would let me fake-believe enough to fill the hole or other ways of getting around the problem.) But yeah, I think I'd choose truth there.
Question 3? Assuming the most inconvenient world (ie, there's no way that I could potentially do more good by keeping the money, etc etc, no way out of the "give it away to do maximal good") well, I'm not sure what I'd do, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to in any way justify not giving it away to Charity X. Though, if I actually had a known Omega give me that information, then I think that might just be enough to give me the mental/emotional/willpower strength to do it. ie, assuming that I KNEW that that way was really the path if I wanted to optimize the good I do in the world, not just in an abstract theoretical way, but was actually told that by a known Omega, well, that might be enough to get me to actually do it.
The souped up Pascal's Wager seems like the thousand door version of Monty Hall.
By principle of charity, I interpret Marshall as saying not that rationalists can't be kind, but that rationalism alone doesn't make you kind. Judging by my informal torture vs. pie experiments, I find this to be true. Rationality is necessary but not sufficient for a friendly world. We also need people who value the right kind of things. Rationality can help clarify and amplify morality, but it's got to start from pre-rational sources. Until further research is done, I suggest making everyone watch a lot of Thundercats and seeing whether that helps :)
Of course, like with every use of the principle of charity, I might just be reading too much into a statement that really was stupid.
Your torture vs. pie experiment makes me think of another potential experiment. Is torture ever preferable to making, say, 3^^^3 people never have pie again? (In the sense of dust specks, the never eating pie is to be the entire consequence of the action. The potential pie utility is just gone, nothing else.)
There's probably a few in there. I won't try to dispute them on a case by case basis. There are, on the other hand, literally thousands of specialists
- I thought this would happen. The wisdom of my plan to list the top 10 academics first and then check whether they're specialists or generalists is paying off...
Another method may be to list the top 10 achievements first and then check whether a specialist or a generalist. I imagine Prometheus was a generalist.
Ok, the best way for me to answer this question is to list the 10 most important scientists/academics of all time, and then look them up on wikipedia. I'll write down the list, and then comment again once I've ascertained how "generalist" they are. So, in order of importance:
- Galileo
- Darwin
- Newton
- Descartes
- Socrates
- Aristotle
- Plato
- Hume
- Einstein
- Francis Bacon
EDIT: I kind of picked these guys at random out of "famous important academics". Berners-Lee is on my mind as I study the semantic web. The main point of the exercise is that I wrote down the names before I went and read their wikipedia articles to see how much they're generalists. Do feel free to suggest changes to this list. Once some consensus is reached, I will post the analysis. I kicked pythagoras off in favor of Francis Bacon, since Bacon seems to be particularly relevant to this site's interests, and the article on Pythagoras disputes the worth of his science. Strictly speaking, this is a bit naughty of me, but what the hell - I'll allow this one indulgence. Note that I didn't look at Francis Bacon's article before I decided he was to go on the list; I was spurred into including him by scientism's comment below.
Darwin was almost preempted by Wallace. Newton and Leibniz arrived at the same calculus independently, and similar work was done by Seki Kowa at the same time. They were merely there first and most prominently, but not uniquely. I think to satisfy importance, we want cut vertex scientists and academics.
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Not entirely sure, though I believe I did post a couple of comments to Overcoming Bias a while back. I used to comment on reddit and comment semi-regularly on Hacker News, which refutes the first explanation that I thought of, that it was a matter of my time, since clearly I do sometimes take time to comment on the internet.
The comments here are high quality, which is somewhat intimidating, and also makes things take longer, since I want to think more carefully about what I say, but that would probably apply to Hacker News as well.
A possible explanation consistent with the quotation I mentioned is that even though I read all the posts here and on Overcoming Bias, I don't think I've thought about the issues deeply enough to have much original to contribute. And that may have something to do with the fact that most of my friends aren't all that interested in the topics. I imagine if I were talking about the posts more often in real life I would feel like I had more to contribute.
I'm in a similar situation - I comment (sometimes) on reddit and HNews, and have occasionally posted a few sentences to OB, but I am much less likely to comment here. The high quality of the posts and comments leads me to agonize a bit overmuch about every part of a comment, and sometimes I will write, edit, and rewrite a comment before deciding to just not comment at all. I, too, often feel I would not be contributing anything original.
(I should also note in this comment that I am male.)