“Do as well as Einstein?” Jeffreyssai said, incredulously. “Just as well as Einstein? Albert Einstein was a great scientist of his era, but that was his era, not this one! Einstein did not comprehend the Bayesian methods; he lived before the cognitive biases were discovered; he had no scientific grasp of his own thought processes. Einstein spoke nonsense of an impersonal God—which tells you how well he understood the rhythm of reason, to discard it outside his own field! He was too caught up in the drama of rejecting his era’s quantum mechanics to actually fix it. And while I grant that Einstein reasoned cleanly in the matter of General Relativity—barring that matter of the cosmological constant—he took ten years to do it. Too slow!”
“Too slow?” repeated Taji incredulously.
“Too slow! If Einstein were in this classroom now, rather than Earth of the negative first century, I would rap his knuckles! You will not try to do as well as Einstein! You will aspire to do BETTER than Einstein or you may as well not bother!”
See, when you put it like that, I think the reason rationalists don’t win as much as was expected is quite obvious: claims about the power of rationality were significant overpromises from the start.
(Yudkowsky, 2008, Class Project)
Probably something along the lines of what LW was meant to aspire to above.
See, when you put it like that, I think the reason rationalists don’t win as much as was expected is quite obvious: claims about the power of rationality were significant overpromises from the start.