It doesn’t take specialist expertise to recognize that Eliezer’s statement is nonsense. Anyone with some basic general knowledge about disease transmission would recognize it as incorrect—that would include most people who briefly scanned a Newsweek article about bird flu within the past six years. All he had to say was that there was no good reason for people to presume transmission from robin to duck would be harder than the other way around. It would even have been shorter and more elegant! He went out of his way to make an untrue statement, one that either makes him look foolish or possibly adds a false ‘fact’ to his readers’ datastore.
Sean, I think you’ve become confused. #3 isn’t my point, it’s Eliezer’s. I have no need to defend it—I’m attacking it.
His overall argument contains multiple interlocking assumptions that aren’t labeled as such, but simply presumed to be true. In addition, he wrote statements that (in the most generous possible reading) poorly illustrated his actual point or (in more hard-nosed evaluations) were both wrong and blatantly so.
It is always, always more important to look for what has gone wrong than to recognize what is correct. There will be crowds of flattering sycophants and yesmen to sing praises and seek out the weakest virtue of the thing for adoration; more aren’t needed. The best creators are their own worst critics. Mediocre creators let their critics find their errors. Bad ones surround themselves with praise and abhor criticism.
It doesn’t take specialist expertise to recognize that Eliezer’s statement is nonsense. Anyone with some basic general knowledge about disease transmission would recognize it as incorrect—that would include most people who briefly scanned a Newsweek article about bird flu within the past six years. All he had to say was that there was no good reason for people to presume transmission from robin to duck would be harder than the other way around. It would even have been shorter and more elegant! He went out of his way to make an untrue statement, one that either makes him look foolish or possibly adds a false ‘fact’ to his readers’ datastore.
Sean, I think you’ve become confused. #3 isn’t my point, it’s Eliezer’s. I have no need to defend it—I’m attacking it.
His overall argument contains multiple interlocking assumptions that aren’t labeled as such, but simply presumed to be true. In addition, he wrote statements that (in the most generous possible reading) poorly illustrated his actual point or (in more hard-nosed evaluations) were both wrong and blatantly so.
It is always, always more important to look for what has gone wrong than to recognize what is correct. There will be crowds of flattering sycophants and yesmen to sing praises and seek out the weakest virtue of the thing for adoration; more aren’t needed. The best creators are their own worst critics. Mediocre creators let their critics find their errors. Bad ones surround themselves with praise and abhor criticism.