Klurl is making a combination of narrow predictions, that for the most part aren’t didactically justified.
By the framing, with the setup transparently referring to a real world scenario, it’s easy for us to import a bunch of assumptions and knowledge about how the world described actually turns out, but Klurl doesn’t have arguments that hang on this knowledge, and the story doesn’t show why their prediction is precisely this, precisely now. This is especially blunt when Klurl gets to be very clever for pointing at Trapaucius’ overly specific arguments, which we know as omniscient observers are falsified, but when Klurl makes overly specific arguments that happen to be right in this scenario but don’t apply in generality to life on earth, the story doesn’t in turn illustrate how this is in a natural class of errors.
I’ll list some particular questions that felt unanswered. Again, because this points at reality it’s very easy for me to gesture at why the world is as it is, but to the story’s characters the entire branch of natural evolution is a novelty. As an illustration of how to argue about a position, it disproves too much: find any heuristic argument that disagrees with your point, find a known counterexample, have a character present the argument about that counterexample, have another character scoff at them for making it, reveal that it was reality all along, moral of the story is that scoffing at that argument is correct.
...Anyway, a list:
Why was Klurl paying specific attention to the rock-sharpening skill, when evolution has a great many more much more impressive natural feats?
Why was this specifically noticed in humans, rather than other animals that do this?
Why did Klurl think this was time-urgent, when the vast majority of the time this would be a bad heuristic?
Why was Klurl assuming humans could solve nuclear engineering but not that evolution could?
Where comes the assumption that fleshlings were the kind of creature that would sustain attempts to circumvent its coordination failures, when there was no evidence of it presented?*
Where comes the assumption that evolution wasn’t the kind of creature that would sustain attempts to circumvent its coordination failures, when there was much evidence of it presented?
What is the fairness of the selected human specifically being a counterexample to the proposed strategy, when even among their class few would have been?
I’m going to stop listing here because I don’t want to reskim over the whole thing, and I don’t think the point is missing much for lack of completeness.
*There was evidence given for some thing at some point solving hard problems. The claim that these were humanlikes was random.
On my reading, most of Klurl’s arguments are just saying that Trapaucius is overconfident. Klurl gives many specific examples of ways things could be different than Trapaucius expects, but Klurl is not predicting that those particular examples actually will be true, just that Trapaucius shouldn’t be ruling them out.
“I don’t recall you setting an exact prediction for fleshling achievements before our arrival,” retorted Trapaucius.
“So I did not,” said Klurl, “but I argued for the possibility not being ruled out, and you ruled it out. It is sometimes possible to do better merely by saying ‘I don’t know’”
Eliezer chooses to use many specific examples that do happen to be actually true, which makes Klurl’s guesses extremely coincidental within the story. This is bad for verisimilitude, but reduces the difficulty to the reader in understanding the examples, and makes a clearer and more water-tight case that Trapaucius’ arguments are logically unsound.
Not a proper reply, but on some of your specific points:
Why was Klurl paying specific attention to the rock-sharpening skill, when evolution has a great many more much more impressive natural feats?
Why was this specifically noticed in humans, rather than other animals that do this?
What examples are you thinking of here? I’m not aware of any other animals that deliberately sharpen rocks, or make any tools that I’d consider equally impressive to stone handaxes, let alone bows and arrows.
(Caveat that this article says monkeys have been seen making sharp rocks, but not using the sharp rocks they made.)
Why did Klurl think this was time-urgent, when the vast majority of the time this would be a bad heuristic?
“One does not live through a turn of the galaxy by taking occasional small risks.”
The underlying reason that Trapaucius is correct is because of author fiat and not any property of his arguments, so we shouldn’t assume that the arguments themselves are sound, even though the conclusion they reach happens to have been true in the real world. For example, if you seeded lots of Earths with proto-life, it might have been the case that very few of them would have developed a technological civilization.
Can you elaborate less metaphorically? I’m not sure what coincidence you’re pointing at.
Klurl is making a combination of narrow predictions, that for the most part aren’t didactically justified.
By the framing, with the setup transparently referring to a real world scenario, it’s easy for us to import a bunch of assumptions and knowledge about how the world described actually turns out, but Klurl doesn’t have arguments that hang on this knowledge, and the story doesn’t show why their prediction is precisely this, precisely now. This is especially blunt when Klurl gets to be very clever for pointing at Trapaucius’ overly specific arguments, which we know as omniscient observers are falsified, but when Klurl makes overly specific arguments that happen to be right in this scenario but don’t apply in generality to life on earth, the story doesn’t in turn illustrate how this is in a natural class of errors.
I’ll list some particular questions that felt unanswered. Again, because this points at reality it’s very easy for me to gesture at why the world is as it is, but to the story’s characters the entire branch of natural evolution is a novelty. As an illustration of how to argue about a position, it disproves too much: find any heuristic argument that disagrees with your point, find a known counterexample, have a character present the argument about that counterexample, have another character scoff at them for making it, reveal that it was reality all along, moral of the story is that scoffing at that argument is correct.
...Anyway, a list:
Why was Klurl paying specific attention to the rock-sharpening skill, when evolution has a great many more much more impressive natural feats?
Why was this specifically noticed in humans, rather than other animals that do this?
Why did Klurl think this was time-urgent, when the vast majority of the time this would be a bad heuristic?
Why was Klurl assuming humans could solve nuclear engineering but not that evolution could?
Where comes the assumption that fleshlings were the kind of creature that would sustain attempts to circumvent its coordination failures, when there was no evidence of it presented?*
Where comes the assumption that evolution wasn’t the kind of creature that would sustain attempts to circumvent its coordination failures, when there was much evidence of it presented?
What is the fairness of the selected human specifically being a counterexample to the proposed strategy, when even among their class few would have been?
I’m going to stop listing here because I don’t want to reskim over the whole thing, and I don’t think the point is missing much for lack of completeness.
*There was evidence given for some thing at some point solving hard problems. The claim that these were humanlikes was random.
On my reading, most of Klurl’s arguments are just saying that Trapaucius is overconfident. Klurl gives many specific examples of ways things could be different than Trapaucius expects, but Klurl is not predicting that those particular examples actually will be true, just that Trapaucius shouldn’t be ruling them out.
Eliezer chooses to use many specific examples that do happen to be actually true, which makes Klurl’s guesses extremely coincidental within the story. This is bad for verisimilitude, but reduces the difficulty to the reader in understanding the examples, and makes a clearer and more water-tight case that Trapaucius’ arguments are logically unsound.
Not a proper reply, but on some of your specific points:
What examples are you thinking of here? I’m not aware of any other animals that deliberately sharpen rocks, or make any tools that I’d consider equally impressive to stone handaxes, let alone bows and arrows.
(Caveat that this article says monkeys have been seen making sharp rocks, but not using the sharp rocks they made.)
“One does not live through a turn of the galaxy by taking occasional small risks.”
The underlying reason that Trapaucius is correct is because of author fiat and not any property of his arguments, so we shouldn’t assume that the arguments themselves are sound, even though the conclusion they reach happens to have been true in the real world. For example, if you seeded lots of Earths with proto-life, it might have been the case that very few of them would have developed a technological civilization.