(I was going to write a post on ‘why I’m skeptical about SIAI’, but I guess this thread is a good place to put it. This was written in a bit of a rush—if it sounds like I am dissing you guys, that isn’t my intention.)
I think the issue isn’t so much ‘arrogance’ per se—I don’t think many of your audience would care about accurate boasts—but rather your arrogance isn’t backed up with any substantial achievement:
You say you’re right on the bleeding edge in very hard bits of technical mathematics (“we have 30-40 papers which could be published on decision theory” in one of lukeprogs Q&As, wasn’t it?), yet as far as I can see none of you have published anything in any field of science. The problem is (as far as I can tell) you’ve been making the same boasts about all these advances you are making for years, and they’ve never been substantiated.
You say you’ve solved all these important philosophical questions (Newcomb, Quantum mechanics, Free will, physicalism, etc.), yet your answers are never published, and never particularly impress those who are actual domain experts in these things—indeed, a complaint I’ve heard commonly is that Lesswrong just simply misunderstand the basics. An example: I’m pretty good at philosophy of religion, and the sort of arguments Lesswrong seems to take as slam-dunks for Atheism (“biases!” “Kolmogorov complexity!”) just aren’t impressive, or even close to the level of discussion seen in academia. This itself is no big deal (ditto the MWI, phil of mind), but it makes for an impression of being intellectual dilettantes spouting off on matters you aren’t that competent in. (I’m pretty sure most analytic philospohers roll their eyes at all the ‘tabooing’ and ‘dissolving problems’ - they were trying to solve philosophy that way 80 years ago!) Worse, my (admittedly anecdotal) survey suggests a pretty mixed reception from domain-experts in stuff that really matters to your project, like probability theory, decision theory etc.
You also generally talk about how awesome you all are via the powers of rationalism, yet none of you have done anything particularly awesome by standard measures of achievement. Writing a forest of blog posts widely reputed to be pretty good doesn’t count. Nor does writing lots of summaries of modern cogsci and stuff.
It is not all bad. Because there are lots of people who are awesome by conventional metrics and do awesome things who take you guys seriously, and meeting these people has raised my confidence that you guys are doing something interesting. But reflected esteem can only take you so far.
So my feeling is basically ‘put up or shut up’. You guys need to build a record of tangible/‘real world’ achievements, like writing some breakthrough papers on decision theory (or any papers on anything) which are published and taken seriously in mainstream science, a really popular book on ‘everyday rationality’, going off and using rationality to make zillions from the stock market, or whatever. I gather you folks are trying to do some of these: great! Until then, though, your ‘arrogance problem’ is simply that you promise lots and do little.
(I was going to write a post on ‘why I’m skeptical about SIAI’, but I guess this thread is a good place to put it. This was written in a bit of a rush—if it sounds like I am dissing you guys, that isn’t my intention.)
I think the issue isn’t so much ‘arrogance’ per se—I don’t think many of your audience would care about accurate boasts—but rather your arrogance isn’t backed up with any substantial achievement:
You say you’re right on the bleeding edge in very hard bits of technical mathematics (“we have 30-40 papers which could be published on decision theory” in one of lukeprogs Q&As, wasn’t it?), yet as far as I can see none of you have published anything in any field of science. The problem is (as far as I can tell) you’ve been making the same boasts about all these advances you are making for years, and they’ve never been substantiated.
You say you’ve solved all these important philosophical questions (Newcomb, Quantum mechanics, Free will, physicalism, etc.), yet your answers are never published, and never particularly impress those who are actual domain experts in these things—indeed, a complaint I’ve heard commonly is that Lesswrong just simply misunderstand the basics. An example: I’m pretty good at philosophy of religion, and the sort of arguments Lesswrong seems to take as slam-dunks for Atheism (“biases!” “Kolmogorov complexity!”) just aren’t impressive, or even close to the level of discussion seen in academia. This itself is no big deal (ditto the MWI, phil of mind), but it makes for an impression of being intellectual dilettantes spouting off on matters you aren’t that competent in. (I’m pretty sure most analytic philospohers roll their eyes at all the ‘tabooing’ and ‘dissolving problems’ - they were trying to solve philosophy that way 80 years ago!) Worse, my (admittedly anecdotal) survey suggests a pretty mixed reception from domain-experts in stuff that really matters to your project, like probability theory, decision theory etc.
You also generally talk about how awesome you all are via the powers of rationalism, yet none of you have done anything particularly awesome by standard measures of achievement. Writing a forest of blog posts widely reputed to be pretty good doesn’t count. Nor does writing lots of summaries of modern cogsci and stuff.
It is not all bad. Because there are lots of people who are awesome by conventional metrics and do awesome things who take you guys seriously, and meeting these people has raised my confidence that you guys are doing something interesting. But reflected esteem can only take you so far.
So my feeling is basically ‘put up or shut up’. You guys need to build a record of tangible/‘real world’ achievements, like writing some breakthrough papers on decision theory (or any papers on anything) which are published and taken seriously in mainstream science, a really popular book on ‘everyday rationality’, going off and using rationality to make zillions from the stock market, or whatever. I gather you folks are trying to do some of these: great! Until then, though, your ‘arrogance problem’ is simply that you promise lots and do little.
No, that wasn’t it. I said 30-40 papers of research. Most of that is strategic research, like Carl Shulman’s papers, not decision theory work.
Otherwise, I almost entirely agree with your comments.