predicting that your evidence will probably be of low quality if it takes a certain form.
Robin seems to think that some of your evidence is a causal analysis of mechanisms based on poorly-grounded abstractions. Given that it’s not logically rude for him to think that your abstractions are poorly grounded, it’s not logically rude for him to predict that they will probably offer poor evidence, and so to predict that they will probably not change his beliefs significantly.
I’m not commenting here on whose predictions are higher-quality. I just don’t think that Robin was being logically rude. If anything, he was helpfully reporting which arguments are mostly likely to sway him. Furthermore, he seems to welcome your trying to persuade him to give other arguments more weight. He probably expects that you won’t succeed, but, so long as he welcomes the attempt, I don’t think that he can be accused of trying to halt the conversation.
Thanks to the OB/LW split, it’s pretty awkward to try to find all the posts in sequence. I thinkTotal Nano Domination is the first one*, and Total Tech Wars was Robin’s reply. They went back and forth after that for a few days (you can follow along in the archives), and then restored the congenial atmosphere by jointly advocating cryonics. In fall 2009 they got into it again in a comment thread on OB.
Don’t neglect the surrounding context. The underlying disagreements have been echoing about all over the place in the form of “Contrarians boo vs Correct Contrarians yay!” and “here is a stupid view that can be classed as an inside view therefore inside view sucks!” vs “high status makes you stupid” and “let’s play reference class tennis”.
I think that we should distinguish
trying to halt the conversation, from
predicting that your evidence will probably be of low quality if it takes a certain form.
Robin seems to think that some of your evidence is a causal analysis of mechanisms based on poorly-grounded abstractions. Given that it’s not logically rude for him to think that your abstractions are poorly grounded, it’s not logically rude for him to predict that they will probably offer poor evidence, and so to predict that they will probably not change his beliefs significantly.
I’m not commenting here on whose predictions are higher-quality. I just don’t think that Robin was being logically rude. If anything, he was helpfully reporting which arguments are mostly likely to sway him. Furthermore, he seems to welcome your trying to persuade him to give other arguments more weight. He probably expects that you won’t succeed, but, so long as he welcomes the attempt, I don’t think that he can be accused of trying to halt the conversation.
Can someone please link to the posts in question for the latecomers?
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Hanson-Yudkowsky_AI-Foom_Debate
Thanks to the OB/LW split, it’s pretty awkward to try to find all the posts in sequence. I think Total Nano Domination is the first one*, and Total Tech Wars was Robin’s reply. They went back and forth after that for a few days (you can follow along in the archives), and then restored the congenial atmosphere by jointly advocating cryonics. In fall 2009 they got into it again in a comment thread on OB.
* maybe it was prompted by Abstract/Distant Future Bias.
Don’t neglect the surrounding context. The underlying disagreements have been echoing about all over the place in the form of “Contrarians boo vs Correct Contrarians yay!” and “here is a stupid view that can be classed as an inside view therefore inside view sucks!” vs “high status makes you stupid” and “let’s play reference class tennis”.
Good point. Hard to track down the links though.