I disagree with your claim that I “reflexively characterized all skepticism as hostile.” I have reread my own comment and I do not think that’s a fair or accurate synopsis.
I believe you are overstating your claim that “there are also many thousands of smart people, including even ones with medical degrees, who endorse homeopathy” and disagree with the attempt to draw an equivalency there (I both do not think the situations are analogous and don’t think you could actually find thousands of people in the intersection of “smart” and “endorses homeopathy”).
My main point is that it looks to me like you are skeptical of everything but your own impressions, and that Less Wrong should be the sort of place where people actually take heuristics and biases literature seriously, and take the Sequences seriously, and are aware of how fallible their own thinking and impression-making mechanisms are, and how likely it is that they’re being influenced by metacognitive blindspots, and take deliberate and visible steps to compensate for all of that by practicing calibration, using reference class forecasting, taking the outside view, making concrete predictions, seeking falsification rather than confirmation, etc. etc. etc.
In short, I wasn’t asking you to be less skeptical, I was asking you to add one more person to your list of people you’re skeptical of—yourself.
I’m attempting to point out that your claim “Double Crux seems like an attempt to solve a problem that almost never happens” seems to have been outright falsified—even if your homeopathy analogy holds, homeopaths aren’t necessarily hypochondriacs, and I would trust the reports of homeopaths who are saying “I am experiencing this-or-that physiological distress which requires some form of treatment” or “I am having this-or-that medical problem which is lowering my quality of life” without reference to their thoughts on what would fix it. It does not seem that you are updating away from “the problems that Double Crux purports to solve are rare” and toward “those problems are rare in my experience but reliably common for large numbers of people.”
I’m attempting to point out that your statement “I can see one of three things happening” was made in such a way as to imply that there are no other likely things that might happen, and that you’re considering your ability to generate hypotheses or scenarios or predictions to be likely sufficient and near-complete. It’s like when Myth Busters say “Well, we failed to recreate claim X, and therefore claim X is impossible!” That whole paragraph was setting up strawmen and false dichotomies and ignoring giant swaths of possibility.
I didn’t feel like you really addressed any of the thrust of my previous reply, which was something like “If I, clone of saturn, were wrong about Double Crux, how would I know? Where would I look to find the data that would disconfirm my impressions?”
It does not look, based on your comments thus far, like you’re sincerely asking that question. Again, that’s fine—it could simply be that it’s not worth your time. Or it could be that you’re asking that question and I just haven’t noticed yet, and that’s fine because it’s in no way your job to appease some rando on the internet, and my endorsement is not your goal.
But the issue I have, at least, has nothing to do with your opinion on Double Crux. It has to do with the public impression you’re leaving, of how you’re forming and informing it. You’re laying claim to explicitly prosocial behavior on the basis of continuing skepticism, and I simply don’t believe you’re living up to the ideals you think you are. I think Less Wrong has (or ought have) a higher standard than the one you’re visibly meeting. The difference between solving the Emperor’s Clothes problem and just being a contrarian is evidence and sound argument.
Is this ad hominem? Reasonable people could say that clone of saturn values ~1000 self-reports way too little. However it is not reasonable to claim that he is not at all skeptical of himself, and not aware of his biases and blind spots, and is just a contrarian.
“If I, clone of saturn, were wrong about Double Crux, how would I know? Where would I look to find the data that would disconfirm my impressions?”
Personally, I would go to a post about Double Crux, and ask for examples of it actually working (as Said Achmiz did). Alternatively, I would list the specific concerns I have about Double Crux, and hope for constructive counterarguments (as clone of saturn did). Seeing that neither of these approaches generated any evidence, I would deduce that my impressions were right.
I disagree with your claim that I “reflexively characterized all skepticism as hostile.” I have reread my own comment and I do not think that’s a fair or accurate synopsis.
I believe you are overstating your claim that “there are also many thousands of smart people, including even ones with medical degrees, who endorse homeopathy” and disagree with the attempt to draw an equivalency there (I both do not think the situations are analogous and don’t think you could actually find thousands of people in the intersection of “smart” and “endorses homeopathy”).
My main point is that it looks to me like you are skeptical of everything but your own impressions, and that Less Wrong should be the sort of place where people actually take heuristics and biases literature seriously, and take the Sequences seriously, and are aware of how fallible their own thinking and impression-making mechanisms are, and how likely it is that they’re being influenced by metacognitive blindspots, and take deliberate and visible steps to compensate for all of that by practicing calibration, using reference class forecasting, taking the outside view, making concrete predictions, seeking falsification rather than confirmation, etc. etc. etc.
In short, I wasn’t asking you to be less skeptical, I was asking you to add one more person to your list of people you’re skeptical of—yourself.
I’m attempting to point out that your claim “Double Crux seems like an attempt to solve a problem that almost never happens” seems to have been outright falsified—even if your homeopathy analogy holds, homeopaths aren’t necessarily hypochondriacs, and I would trust the reports of homeopaths who are saying “I am experiencing this-or-that physiological distress which requires some form of treatment” or “I am having this-or-that medical problem which is lowering my quality of life” without reference to their thoughts on what would fix it. It does not seem that you are updating away from “the problems that Double Crux purports to solve are rare” and toward “those problems are rare in my experience but reliably common for large numbers of people.”
I’m attempting to point out that your statement “I can see one of three things happening” was made in such a way as to imply that there are no other likely things that might happen, and that you’re considering your ability to generate hypotheses or scenarios or predictions to be likely sufficient and near-complete. It’s like when Myth Busters say “Well, we failed to recreate claim X, and therefore claim X is impossible!” That whole paragraph was setting up strawmen and false dichotomies and ignoring giant swaths of possibility.
I didn’t feel like you really addressed any of the thrust of my previous reply, which was something like “If I, clone of saturn, were wrong about Double Crux, how would I know? Where would I look to find the data that would disconfirm my impressions?”
It does not look, based on your comments thus far, like you’re sincerely asking that question. Again, that’s fine—it could simply be that it’s not worth your time. Or it could be that you’re asking that question and I just haven’t noticed yet, and that’s fine because it’s in no way your job to appease some rando on the internet, and my endorsement is not your goal.
But the issue I have, at least, has nothing to do with your opinion on Double Crux. It has to do with the public impression you’re leaving, of how you’re forming and informing it. You’re laying claim to explicitly prosocial behavior on the basis of continuing skepticism, and I simply don’t believe you’re living up to the ideals you think you are. I think Less Wrong has (or ought have) a higher standard than the one you’re visibly meeting. The difference between solving the Emperor’s Clothes problem and just being a contrarian is evidence and sound argument.
Is this ad hominem? Reasonable people could say that clone of saturn values ~1000 self-reports way too little. However it is not reasonable to claim that he is not at all skeptical of himself, and not aware of his biases and blind spots, and is just a contrarian.
Personally, I would go to a post about Double Crux, and ask for examples of it actually working (as Said Achmiz did). Alternatively, I would list the specific concerns I have about Double Crux, and hope for constructive counterarguments (as clone of saturn did). Seeing that neither of these approaches generated any evidence, I would deduce that my impressions were right.