If there’s a norm of shaming critics who predict very bad outcomes
I think it is hugely important to point out that this is not the norm Duncan is operating under or proposing. I understand Duncan as saying “hey, remember those people who were nasty and uncharitable and disgusted by me and my plans? Their predictions failed to come true.”
Like, quoting from you during the original discussion of the charter:
I would never participate in the linked concept and I think it will probably fail, maybe disastrously.
But I also have a (only partially endorsed) squick reaction to the comments against it. I guess I take it as more axiomatic than other people that if people want to try something weird, and are only harming themselves, that if you make fun of them for it, you’re a bully.
Of course, here, “the comments against it” isn’t ‘anyone who speaks about against the idea.’ One can take jbeshir’s comment as an example of someone pointing directly at the possibility of catastrophic abuse while maintaining good discourse and epistemic norms.
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I note that I am generally not a fan of vaguebooking / making interventions on the abstract level instead of the object level, and if I were going to write a paragraph like the one in the OP I would have named names instead of making my claims high-context.
Agreed that some people were awful, but I still think this problem applies.
If somebody says “There’s a 80% chance of rain today, you idiot, and everyone who thinks otherwise deserves to die”, then it’s still not clear that a sunny day has proven them wrong. Or rather, they were always wrong to be a jerk, but a single run of the experiment doesn’t do much to prove they were wronger than we already believed.
Or rather, they were always wrong to be a jerk, but a single run of the experiment doesn’t do much to prove they were wronger than we already believed.
To be clear, I agree with this. Furthermore, while I don’t remember people giving probability distributions, I think it’s fair to guess that critics as a whole (and likely even the irrational critics) put higher probability on the coarse description of what actually happened than Duncan or those of us that tried the experiment, and that makes an “I told you so!” about assigning lower probability to something that didn’t happen hollow.
I agree with this. Perhaps a better expression of the thing (if I had felt like it was the right spot in the piece to spend this many words) would’ve been:
they were systematically wrong then, in loudly espousing beliefs whose truth value was genuinely in question but for which they had insufficient justification, and wrong in terms of their belongingness within the culture of a group of people who want to call themselves “rationalists” and who care about making incremental progress toward actual truth, and I believe that the sacrifice of their specific, non-zero, non-useless data and perspective is well worth making to have the correct walls around our garden and weeding heuristics within it. And I see no reason for that to have changed in the intervening six months.
I suspect that coming out of the gate with that many words would’ve pattern-matched to whining, though, and that my specific parenthetical was still stronger once you take into account social reality.
I’m curious if you a) agree or disagree or something-else with the quote above, and b) agree or disagree or something-else with my prediction that the above would’ve garnered a worse response.
I think it is hugely important to point out that this is not the norm Duncan is operating under or proposing. I understand Duncan as saying “hey, remember those people who were nasty and uncharitable and disgusted by me and my plans? Their predictions failed to come true.”
Like, quoting from you during the original discussion of the charter:
Of course, here, “the comments against it” isn’t ‘anyone who speaks about against the idea.’ One can take jbeshir’s comment as an example of someone pointing directly at the possibility of catastrophic abuse while maintaining good discourse and epistemic norms.
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I note that I am generally not a fan of vaguebooking / making interventions on the abstract level instead of the object level, and if I were going to write a paragraph like the one in the OP I would have named names instead of making my claims high-context.
Agreed that some people were awful, but I still think this problem applies.
If somebody says “There’s a 80% chance of rain today, you idiot, and everyone who thinks otherwise deserves to die”, then it’s still not clear that a sunny day has proven them wrong. Or rather, they were always wrong to be a jerk, but a single run of the experiment doesn’t do much to prove they were wronger than we already believed.
To be clear, I agree with this. Furthermore, while I don’t remember people giving probability distributions, I think it’s fair to guess that critics as a whole (and likely even the irrational critics) put higher probability on the coarse description of what actually happened than Duncan or those of us that tried the experiment, and that makes an “I told you so!” about assigning lower probability to something that didn’t happen hollow.
I agree with this. Perhaps a better expression of the thing (if I had felt like it was the right spot in the piece to spend this many words) would’ve been:
I suspect that coming out of the gate with that many words would’ve pattern-matched to whining, though, and that my specific parenthetical was still stronger once you take into account social reality.
I’m curious if you a) agree or disagree or something-else with the quote above, and b) agree or disagree or something-else with my prediction that the above would’ve garnered a worse response.