Summary of the major stuff I think Eliezer is wrong on:
Everything Eliezer wrote about blue tentacles is wrong.
Eliezer’s use of phlogiston as an example of a bad hypothesis shows lack of historical knowledge about what was actually believed. Phlogiston was rejected by and large because it had been falsified. So claiming that it was unfalsifiable is incorrect. It is true that some people (especially Joseph Priestly) tried to add additional ad hoc hypotheses to prevent its falsification but they were a tiny minority.
Eliezer drastically overestimates the difference between “traditional rationalism” and “extreme rationalism”.
Eliezer underestimates how many physicists take MWI seriously, yet at the same time ignores that many people who have thought about the same issues as he has and know a lot more about it than he does have not accepted it.
Eliezer’s negative opinion about academia is by and large inaccurate and unjustified and to some extent seems to extend from stereotypes of it that aren’t really accurate and his own lack of experience with it.
Eliezer has massive nostalgia for the science and the attitudes about science from the 1960s or so that are deeply unjustified.
Eliezer massively overestimates the chance of an intelligence explosion occurring, primarily because he doesn’t take into account how difficult software optimization is and how much theoretical compsci puts limits on it, and he underestimates how much technical difficulty is involved in serious nanotech.
Not posts but comments he has made. All such comments are actually pretty recent so they may be functions of recent viewpoints. There seems to be hints of this in some older remarks but 1 and 2 are recent extreme examples. Curiously, judging from the karma, a lot of the community disagreed with Eliezer on the first claim but a lot agreed with him on the second.
Summary of the major stuff I think Eliezer is wrong on:
Everything Eliezer wrote about blue tentacles is wrong.
Eliezer’s use of phlogiston as an example of a bad hypothesis shows lack of historical knowledge about what was actually believed. Phlogiston was rejected by and large because it had been falsified. So claiming that it was unfalsifiable is incorrect. It is true that some people (especially Joseph Priestly) tried to add additional ad hoc hypotheses to prevent its falsification but they were a tiny minority.
Eliezer drastically overestimates the difference between “traditional rationalism” and “extreme rationalism”.
Eliezer underestimates how many physicists take MWI seriously, yet at the same time ignores that many people who have thought about the same issues as he has and know a lot more about it than he does have not accepted it.
Eliezer’s negative opinion about academia is by and large inaccurate and unjustified and to some extent seems to extend from stereotypes of it that aren’t really accurate and his own lack of experience with it.
Eliezer has massive nostalgia for the science and the attitudes about science from the 1960s or so that are deeply unjustified.
Eliezer massively overestimates the chance of an intelligence explosion occurring, primarily because he doesn’t take into account how difficult software optimization is and how much theoretical compsci puts limits on it, and he underestimates how much technical difficulty is involved in serious nanotech.
Can you expand on this? Which posts are you referring to?
Not posts but comments he has made. All such comments are actually pretty recent so they may be functions of recent viewpoints. There seems to be hints of this in some older remarks but 1 and 2 are recent extreme examples. Curiously, judging from the karma, a lot of the community disagreed with Eliezer on the first claim but a lot agreed with him on the second.
Ok, I give. Where does Eliezer talk about blue tentacles?
In Some Claims Are Just Too Extraordinary. I’m not sure if he still believes this, though, since it seems to contradict the spirit of How To Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3.
Note that the original whole “blue tentacle” thing is from A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation.
Thanks, I’d forgotten about that.