Related: Philosopher Peter van Inwagen on the way that one philosopher can disagree with another while accepting that the other guy is smarter and better informed. (Which he points out both because he finds it interesting in itself, and to argue that there's something inconsistent in complaining about religious believers -- of whom he is one -- believing things when the balance of the evidence is against them.)
Fair enough! I think the article would be improved by making this a bit more explicit somehow.
1The title advertises a quantum version of Bayes' rule, but so far as I can tell the actual post never explicitly presents one. Am I missing something?
FWIW my personal intention -- only time will tell whether I actually stick to it -- is to be a little more vigorous in disagreeing with things that I think likely to be anti-rational, precisely because Said will no longer be doing it.
1Well, right now my comment saying what I think "top author" means to most LW readers is on +12/+4 while yours saying what you think it means to most readers is on -18/-10. LW karma is a pretty poor measure of quality, but it does give some indication of what LW readers think, no?
And no, it does not clearly mean "person whom Oliver Habryka likes". You can get it to mean that if you assume that all subjective evaluations collapse into "liking". I do not make that assumption, and I don't think you should either.
I took "top author" to mean something like "person whose writing's overall influence on LW has been one of the most positive". I would not expect that to be equivalent to anything mechanically quantifiable (e.g., any combination of karma, upvotes, number of links, number of comments, proportion of replies classified as positive-sentiment by an LLM, etc.), though I would expect various quantifiable things to correlate quite well with it. I would not take it to mean "person whom Oliver Habryka likes" but I would expect that Oliver's judgement of who is and isn't a "top author" to be somewhat opaque and not to come down to some clear-cut precisely-stated criterion. I would not expect it to mean something objective; I would expect it to be somewhat intersubjective, in that I would e.g. expect a lot of commonality between different LW participants' assessment of who is and who isn't a "top author".
There is a lot of space between "completely meaningless, nothing but vibes, just Oliver's opinion" and "answerable by looking at some sort of data somewhere". I would take "top author" to live somewhere in that space, and my guess (for which I have no concrete evidence to offer, any more than you apparently do for what you are "quite sure most readers would assume") is that the majority of LW readers would broadly agree with me about this.
1Let me join the chorus: please do not leave in protest; your comments here do some of the same positive things that Said's comments do, and your leaving would have a bunch of the negative consequences of Said's banning without the positive ones (because, at least so it seems to me, you are much less annoying than Said).
(For the avoidance of doubt, I find you a net-positive commenter here for reasons other than that you do some of the useful things Said has done, but that particular aspect seems the most relevant on this occasion.)
In the "Bomb" scenario, suppose we delete the words "by running a simulation of you and seeing what the simulation did" and replace them with something like "by carefully analysing your brain in order to deduce what you would do".
I am not an FDT expert and so maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that FDT still says you should pick Left (because, a priori, if your algorithm picks Right then the predictor will put the bomb in Left and you'll have to pay, whereas if your algorithm picks Left then the predictor will leave the bomb out and you won't, and the latter is the better outcome).
But in this version of the "Bomb" scenario, you have no particular reason to think that in addition to the real-world you making the choice there's also a faithfully-simulated you that you-right-now might equally plausibly turn out to be. You might perhaps worry that that might be how the predictor is doing her analysis, but unless you think she almost certainly ran a faithful simulation it seems obvious that you do better to pick Right contrary to FDT's recommendation.
(Once again, I'm not an expert and there's a good chance I'm missing something important. If so, I hope someone will enlighten me.)
For sure nothing in the real world can really grow exponentially for ever. I don't know how consistently the failure to grow exponentially for ever looks like a sigmoid rather than, say, an exponential that abruptly runs into a wall, or an exponential that gets "abandoned" before it turns sigmoid because some other thing comes along to take its place.
I'll tweak the wording in the OP to be clearer about this. [EDITED to add:] Now done.
I agree. (Or perhaps we should plot in log space when measuring/minimizing errors in log space, and plot in linear space when measuring/minimizing errors in linear space. The former is nearer to the Right Thing here than the latter.)
There are several things I find unsatisfactory in my own analysis here and either I will write a followup or Valentin2026 and I will write one together. (We're still discussing.)