So I appologize, Vladimir for bringing this up again, but i'm sort of a newcomer :)
However, notice that even in "Building Something Smarter" Eliezer does NOT deny his underlying need for a religious foundation (he simply declines to comment, which, among other things denotes his own dissatisfaction with that, well, bias).
Vladimir, Kant once advised: "free yourself from the self-incurred tutelage of others".
I think that even if you consider Eliezer's Fun Theory as a somehow independent ethical construct (whatever that means), you still fail to accommodate for the lack of evidentialism in it. To me it appears as a mash-up of sporadic belief and wishful thinking, and definitely worth considering the ad hominem causality for it.
I don't know if this comment will get pass the political correctness criterion. May the webadmin have mercy on my soul :)
Eliezer, I am very much tempted to go into personal comments. I will do that on one premise only – that the title of this blog is “Overcoming Bias”. I would like to contribute to that purpose in good faith.
Having read some of Eliezer’s posts I was sure that he has been treated with a high dose of Orthodox Judaism. In this post he specifically points to that fact, thus confirming my analysis. To other readers: Orthodox Judaism requires th...
Jason, please see my comment in the next Eliezer post.
Dagon has made a point I referred to in the previous post: in the sentence “I have unlimited power” there are four unknown terms.
What is I? What does individuality include? How is it generated? Eliezer does not consider the evasive notion of self, because he is too focused on the highly hypothetical assumption of “self” that we adhere to in Western societies. However, should he take off the hat of ingenuity for a while, he would discover that the mere defining of “self” is extremely difficult, if not impossible.
“Unlimited” goes in the same basket as “perfe...
Eliezer,
I am very much inclined to analyze your articles because you are indeed very enthusiastic about your theories, which is a rarity these days. On the link there’s a Wordle tag cloud picture of your article.
As you can see, there’s a lot of “argument(s)”,”moral”, “abstract”, “fiction’, and a somewhat humble “experience”.
To the point – fiction in the literary domain is often a method for implying moral concepts. But fiction is, above all, an invitation to imagine. There is a catch. We can imagine a setting, a world, a relationship. But we sometimes cann... (read more)