One problem with this is that the amount of effort you can spend on a set of problems of this sort is nearly unbounded. If the problems are simple enough that a decent understanding of the subject leads you to get them all correct, you will only have to spend as much time as it takes to finish the assignment, and then you're done. If a decent understanding of the subject only leads you to get 50% correct, then you'll probably be in a position where you can spend another hour and raise that to 55%, and another hour for 57%, etc. You don't know (until after the fact) how much you need to get correct to actually get a good grade, so you're stuck not knowing how much effort is reasonable.

Furthermore, if it's graded on a curve, this will result in a race to the bottom where everyone spends an extra two hours for that 7% advantage over everyone else and since everyone's spent it, the overall effect is just that everyone spent an extra two hours for little benefit.

And woe be it if you have two such assignments at the same time. Not only do you have to worry about spending unlimited time because you don't know when you're done, it's going to be very difficult to work on the assignments in order without shifting between one and the other constantly so you don't spend all your effort on increasing one by 5% when that same effort could have increased the other one by 10%.

It's what happens when you look at the lessons of "Politics is the Mind-Killer" and "Reversed stupidity is not intelligence", and decide to ignore them because affective spirals are too much fun to give up.

But it's difficult to choose whether the correct reversed stupidity in politics should actually be libertarianism or monarchy. The former seems more popular among LW crowd, but that also makes it kinda boring; the latter seems more original, but is usually defended by worse arguments. So you invent a libertarian-ish monarchy world, where the freely competing subjects are not the puny average humans, but the Gods-Emperors of different states. (You call all other regimes "demotist" to show that they are actually all the same.)

Of course, putting it this way is not attractive, so you have to hide it in hundreds of pages written in obscurantist language, so that no outsider is really sure what you are actually talking about. Then you insert some interesting historical facts, and a lot of criticism of political left, some of which is insightful.

And then you keep promoting the new teaching in LessWrong debates, because clever contrarianism is your selling point, and LessWrong has a weakness for clever contrarians. And then you use your presence at LessWrong as a proof that rational people support you, despite the fact that your fans are actually a tiny minority here (probably even smaller than religious people; and LW is explicitly atheistic).

Better analysis can be found here: "Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell", "The Anti-Reactionary FAQ". The first article explains the ideas better than the original sources, and the second article shows that this map doesn't fit the territory.

EDIT: Ignoring the beliefs and focusing only on behavior, Neoreaction is LessWrong's creepy stalker.

The Subsecretaria de Telecomunicaciones of Chile ruled that zero-rating services like Wikipedia Zero, Facebook Zero, and Google Free Zone, that subsidize mobile data usage, violate net neutrality laws and had to end the practice by June 1, 2014.

Wait, what?

David Meyer expresses a similar conviction in GigaOm, writing, “Broadly, though, it has the makings of a strategic disaster, stopping Facebook (and any other social network or messaging service) from entrenching itself in the mobile market in an unassailable way. And in the long term, for consumers, that is a very good thing indeed.”

Oh. Interesting.

So there are people using almost no data (assuming they actually did measure themselves), and they claim to know better.

Software programmers also frequently argue that it's impossible to measure software productivity.

I'd like to note the sheer volume of people in the wider startup ecosystem generating reasons why they are smarter than science when this is brought up.

Let's investigate how little "evidence" they need before they completely ignore said research:

Many have the unmeasured, ridiculously unreliable anecdata "I produce amortized peak output working at a higher number of hours per week" (it's hard to tell that anyone has actually tried looking before claiming it, though: work 6 months at 40 hours/week and another 6 months at 70/hours a week). Why is this unreliable? Because working longer hours produces more artifacts of work, even when it produces less deliverable work. You have all these memories of being in an office, more emails, more comments in your bug trackers, etc. But how much work is done? Even if they did the experiment, there isn't a coherent way of measuring productivity of creative workers with n=1, almost all of us have quite a lot of variation in the complexity and familiarity of our work.

I know of only a couple people who have dramatically dropped their hours, and 100% of them are more productive (both more efficient and effective).

So there are people using almost no data (assuming they actually did measure themselves), and they claim to know better.

This is all to say, the startup ecosystem isn't thinking this through carefully. To the extent they end up being correct it will be largely coincidence.

Also, as regards a "Great Stagnation": Strongly Doubt is not the opposite of Strongly Believe. So I have strong doubts where the balance of my estimation is that Cowen is incorrect -- my radio button does not exist, it is too far to one end of the spectrum, despite not being a hyper-radicalized opinion.

I think you should average over your meta-uncertainty and answer according to your overall probability.

I am somewhat disappointed to be asked about favorability with a movement without allowing me to distinguish between the ideals of that movement and the movement as it exists (see: feminism and social justice, which, as phenomenon in reality appear to be ways to generate indignation on tumblr -- I love equality but do not use tumblr and I don't see any purpose in being indignant on the internet).

Also, as regards a "Great Stagnation": Strongly Doubt is not the opposite of Strongly Believe. So I have strong doubts where the balance of my estimation is that Cowen is incorrect -- my radio button does not exist, it is too far to one end of the spectrum, despite not being a hyper-radicalized opinion.