I think both of the example that EY gives are cases where he was public about his position before the empirical evidence came in.
EY wrote on facebook about his project to build the mega lamp to help Brienne and was confident enough in it to convince her not to spent the winter outside of the US.
The example with the Japanese fiscal policy is also one where EY was public about his views before the empirical evidence was public.
That doesn’t help because there’s no baseline. How many times did he have public positions that didn’t pan out?
But the point is that “Eliezer knew better than the experts with respect to lamps” doesn’t imply “Eliezer knows better than the experts on typical LW topics about which Eliezer claims to know better than the experts”.
I think both of the example that EY gives are cases where he was public about his position before the empirical evidence came in.
EY wrote on facebook about his project to build the mega lamp to help Brienne and was confident enough in it to convince her not to spent the winter outside of the US.
The example with the Japanese fiscal policy is also one where EY was public about his views before the empirical evidence was public.
That doesn’t help because there’s no baseline. How many times did he have public positions that didn’t pan out?
But the point is that “Eliezer knew better than the experts with respect to lamps” doesn’t imply “Eliezer knows better than the experts on typical LW topics about which Eliezer claims to know better than the experts”.