I affirm the correctness of Ben Pace’s anecdote about what he recently heard someone tell me.
“How dare you think that you’re better at meta-rationality than Eliezer Yudkowsky, do you think you’re special”—is somebody trolling? Have they never read anything I’ve written in my entire life? Do they have no sense, even, of irony? Yeah, sure, it’s harder to be better at some things than me, sure, somebody might be skeptical about that, but then you ask for evidence or say “Good luck proving that to us all eventually!” You don’t be like, “Do you think you’re special?” What kind of bystander-killing argumentative superweapon is that? What else would it prove?
I really don’t know how I could make this any clearer. I wrote a small book whose second half was about not doing exactly this. I am left with a sense that I really went to some lengths to prevent this, I did what society demands of a person plus over 10,000% (most people never write any extended arguments against bad epistemology at all, and society doesn’t hold that against them), I was not subtle. At some point I have to acknowledge that other human beings are their own people and I cannot control everything they do—and I hope that others will also acknowledge that I cannot avert all the wrong thoughts that other people think, even if I try, because I sure did try. A lot. Over many years. Aimed at that specific exact way of thinking. People have their own wills, they are not my puppets, they are still not my puppets even if they have read some blog posts of mine or heard summaries from somebody else who once did; I have put in at least one hundred times the amount of effort that would be required, if any effort were required at all, to wash my hands of this way of thinking.
Agreed explicitly for the record.