I intended Leveling Up in Rationality to communicate this:
Despite worries that extreme rationality isn't that great, I think there's reason to hope that it can be great if some other causal factors are flipped the right way (e.g. mastery over akrasia). Here are some detailed examples I can share because they're from my own life...
But some people seem to have read it and heard this instead:
I'm super-awesome. Don't you wish you were more like me? Yay rationality!
This failure (on my part) fits into a larger pattern of the Singularity Institute seeming too arrogant and (perhaps) being too arrogant. As one friend recently told me:
At least among Caltech undergrads and academic mathematicians, it's taboo to toot your own horn. In these worlds, one's achievements speak for themselves, so whether one is a Fields Medalist or a failure, one gains status purely passively, and must appear not to care about being smart or accomplished. I think because you and Eliezer don't have formal technical training, you don't instinctively grasp this taboo. Thus Eliezer's claim of world-class mathematical ability, in combination with his lack of technical publications, make it hard for a mathematician to take him seriously, because his social stance doesn't pattern-match to anything good. Eliezer's arrogance as evidence of technical cluelessness, was one of the reasons I didn't donate until I met [someone at SI in person]. So for instance, your boast that at SI discussions "everyone at the table knows and applies an insane amount of all the major sciences" would make any Caltech undergrad roll their eyes; your standard of an "insane amount" seems to be relative to the general population, not relative to actual scientists. And posting a list of powers you've acquired doesn't make anyone any more impressed than they already were, and isn't a high-status move.
So, I have a few questions:
- What are the most egregious examples of SI's arrogance?
- On which subjects and in which ways is SI too arrogant? Are there subjects and ways in which SI isn't arrogant enough?
- What should SI do about this?
I mostly agree with the first 3/4 of your post. However...
You can't make everyone happy. Whatever policy a website has, some people will leave. I have run away from a few websites that have "no censorship, except in extreme cases" policy, because the typical consequence of such policy is some users attacking other users (weighing the attack carefully to prevent moderator's action) and some users producing huge amounts of noise. And that just wastes my time.
People leaving LW should be considered on case-by-case basis. They are not all in the same category.
To express opinions of rationalwiki authors about lesswrong, probably. And that opinion seems to be that "belief in many worlds + criticism of science = pseudoscience".
I agree with them that "nonstandard belief + criticism of science = high probability of pseudoscience". Except that: (1) among quantum physicists the belief in many worlds is not completely foreign; (2) the criticism of science seems rational to me, and to be fair, don't forget that scholarship is an officially recognized virtue at LW; (3) the criticism of naive Friendly AI approaches is correct, though I doubt the SI's ability to produce something better (so this part really may be crank), but the rest of LW again seems rational to me.
Now, how much rational are the arguments on the talk page of rational wiki? See: "the [HP:MoR link] is to a bunch of crap", "he explicitly wrote [HP:MoR] as propaganda and LessWrong readers are pretty much expected to have read it", "The stuff about 'luminosity' and self-help is definitely highly questionable", "they casually throw physics and chemistry out the window and talk about nanobots as if they can exist", "I have seen lots of examples of 'smart' writing, but have yet to encounter one of 'intelligent' writing", "bunch of scholastic idiots who think they matter somehow", "Esoteric discussions that are hard to understand without knowing a lot about math, decision theory, and most of all the exalted sequences", "Poor writing (in terms of clarity)", "[the word 'emergence'] is treated as disallowed vocabulary", "I wonder how many oracular-looking posts by EY that have become commonplaces were reactions to an AI researcher that had annoyed him that day" etc. To be fair, there are also some positive voices, such as: "Say what you like about the esoteric AI stuff, but that man knows his shit when it comes to cognitive biases and thinking", "I believe we have a wiki here about people who pursue ideas past the point of actual wrongness".
Seems to me like someone has a hammer (a wiki for criticizing pseudoscience) and suddenly everything unusual becomes a nail.
Frankly, most people don't care about lesswrong or SI or rational wiki.