I think calling the character “Simplicio” was a joke. I think that the main function the character is meant to serve is to distinguish “civilizational inadequacy” pessimism from other forms of pessimism. If the discussion were just “person talking about how things are broken vs. person who doesn’t expect things to be broken by default”, it would be easier to round off the former perspective to “generic pessimism/cynicism” or “the forms of pessimism/cynicism I’m most familiar with”.
Inadequate Equilibria was Eliezer trying to explain the perspective he’d previously tagged “civilizational inadequacy” and before that “people are crazy, the world is mad”. One of the main ways he’d previously been misunderstood when he used those phrases was that people took them as “generic cynicism” or “the kind of cynicism I’m used to”, so my model of Eliezer considered it particularly important to differentiate those two things now that he was finally properly explaining the view.
I think calling the character “Simplicio” was a joke. I think that the main function the character is meant to serve is to distinguish “civilizational inadequacy” pessimism from other forms of pessimism. If the discussion were just “person talking about how things are broken vs. person who doesn’t expect things to be broken by default”, it would be easier to round off the former perspective to “generic pessimism/cynicism” or “the forms of pessimism/cynicism I’m most familiar with”.
Inadequate Equilibria was Eliezer trying to explain the perspective he’d previously tagged “civilizational inadequacy” and before that “people are crazy, the world is mad”. One of the main ways he’d previously been misunderstood when he used those phrases was that people took them as “generic cynicism” or “the kind of cynicism I’m used to”, so my model of Eliezer considered it particularly important to differentiate those two things now that he was finally properly explaining the view.