Missed the point. Do you understand that you shouldn't have been confident you knew why cousin_it felt a particular way? Beyond that, personally I'm not all that interested in theorizing about the reasons, but if you really want to know you could just ask.

That you may have discovered the reason that you felt this way does not mean that you have discovered the reason another specific person felt a similar way. In fact, they may not even be unaware of the causes of their feelings.

Probably not wise to categorically tell someone the reasons behind their feelings when you're underinformed, and probably not kind to ruminate on the subject when you can expect it to be unpleasant.

Not sure about the others, but as for me, at some point this spring I realized that talking about saving the world makes me really upset and I'm better off avoiding the whole topic.

I'm not sure what you mean by

Hanson is on the same page as the rest of SIAI with regard to expected utility

As Holden and Eliezer both explicitly state, SIAI itself rejects the "but there's still a chance" argument.

Robin Hanson has been listed as the other major "intelligent/competent" critic of SIAI. That he criticises what seems to be the keystone of Holden's argument should be cause for concern for Holden.

So, I stipulate that Robin, whom Eliezer considers the only other major "intelligent/competent" critic of SI, disagrees with this aspect of Holden's position. I also stipulate that this aspect is the keystone of Holden's argument, and without it all the rest of it is irrelevant. (I'm not sure either of those statements is actually true, but they're beside my point here.)

I do not understand why these stipulated facts should be a significant cause for concern for Holden, who may not consider Eliezer's endorsement of what is and isn't legitimate criticism of SI particularly significant evidence of anything important.

Can you expand on your reasoning here?

But if there's even a chance …

Holden cites two posts (Why We Can’t Take Expected Value Estimates Literally and Maximizing Cost-effectiveness via Critical Inquiry). They are supposed to support the argument that small or very small changes to the probability of an existential risk event occurring are not worth caring about or donating money towards.

I think that these posts both have serious problems (see the comments, esp Carl Shulman's). In particular Why We Can’t Take Expected Value Estimates Literally was heavily criticised by Robin Hanson in On Fudge Factors.

Robin Hanson has been listed as the other major "intelligent/competent" critic of SIAI. That he criticises what seems to be the keystone of Holden's argument should be cause for concern for Holden. (after all, if "even a chance" is good enough, then all the other criticisms melt away).

This would be a much more serious criticism of SIAI if Holden and Hanson could come to agreement on what exactly the problem with SIAI is, and if Holden could sort out the problems with these two supporting posts*

(*of course they won't do that without substantial revision of one or both of their positions because Hanson is on the same page as the rest of SIAI with regard to expected utility, see On Fudge Factors. Hanson's disagreement with SIAI is a different one; approximately that Hanson thinks ems first is likely and that a singleton is both bad and unlikely, and Hanson's axiology is significantly unintuitive to the extent that he is not really on the same page as most people with regard to what counts as a good or bad outcome)

Vladimir_M, what makes you think that elite universities have the desire and money/power to proselytize their "output"?

Mencius Moldbug has convincingly argued on his blog, that intellectual fashion among the ruling class follows intellectual fashion on Harvard by an offset of about one generation. A generation after that the judicial and journalist class exiles any opposition to such thought from public discourse and most educated people move significantly towards it. A generation after that through public schools and the by now decades long exposure to media issuing normative statements on the subject, such beliefs are marginalized even among the uneducated, making any populist opposition to society wide stated value or policy changes a futile gesture destined to live only one season.

It is indeed is a wonderful machine for generating political power through opinion in Western type societies. While I generally have no qualms about Harvard being an acceptable truth generation machine when it comes to say Physics, in areas where it has a conflict of interest, like say economics or sociology let alone political science or ethics it is not a reliable truth generating machine. It is funny how these fields get far more energetic promotion than say Physics or Chemistry.

I am fairly certain the reason creationism is still around as a political force in some US states is because creationism is not a serious threat to The Cathedral. However I do think modern style rationality is indeed only the honest interest of a small small part of academia, a far larger fraction of academia is busy engaged in producing anti-knowledge in the most blatant form of something studies departments and a more convoluted form of ugh field rationalizations found in everything from biology to philosophy.

Academia taken as a whole has no incentives to promote modern rationality, cargo cult rationality and worship of science so anti-knowledge factories can syphon status from say Computer Scientists or Mathematicians perhaps. But not actual rationality.

So yes LessWrong should spend effort on promoting that, however it should not abstain, from challenging and criticizing academia in places where it is systematically wrong.

Vladimir_M, what makes you think that elite universities have the desire and money/power to proselytize their "output"?

I reversed a downvote to this because other people should also suffer by seeing a question this stupid. Fifteen members of the 111th Congress earned bachelor's degrees from Harvard, 11 current congressmen called Stanford home during their undergraduate days, ten members of Congress got their bachelors from Yale. This includes neither MBAs nor JDs Source here

I don't think "parochial" is the right word here -- a more accurate term for what you're describing would be "contrarian."

In any case, insofar as there exists some coherent body of insight that can be named "Less Wrong rationality," one of its main problems is that it lacks any really useful methods for separating truth from nonsense when it comes to the output of the contemporary academia and other high-status intellectual institutions. I find this rather puzzling: on the one hand, I see people here who seem seriously interested in forming a more accurate view of the world -- but at the same time, living in a society that has vast powerful, influential, and super-high-status official intellectual institutions that deal with all imaginable topics, they show little or no interest in the question of what systematic biases and perverse incentives might be influencing their output.

Now, the point of your post seems to be that LW is good because its opinion is in line with that of these high-status institutions. (Presumably thanks to the fact that both sides have accurately converged onto the truth.) But then what exactly makes LW useful or worthwhile in any way? Are the elite universities so marginalized and powerless that they need help from a blog run by amateurs to spread the word about their output? It really seems to me that if a forum like LW is to have any point at all, it can only be in identifying correct contrarian positions. Otherwise you might as well just cut out the middleman and look at the mainstream academic output directly.