I think the use of dialogues to illustrate a point of view is overdone on LessWrong. Almost always, the ‘Simplicio’ character fails to accurately represent the smart version of the viewpoint he stands in for, because the author doesn’t try sufficiently hard to pass the ITT of the view they’re arguing against. As a result, not only is the dialogue unconvincing, it runs the risk of misleading readers about the actual content of a worldview. I think this is true to a greater extent than posts that just state a point of view and argue against it, because the dialogue format naively appears to actually represent a named representative of a point of view, and structurally discourages disclaimers of the type “as I understand it, defenders of proposition P might state X, but of course I could be wrong”.
I’m a little confused by this one, because in your previous response you say that you think Bob accurately represents Eliezer’s position, and now you seem to be complaining about the opposite?
Actually, I think the synthesis is that many of the things that Bob is saying are implications of Eliezer’s description and ways of getting close to Bayesian reasoning, but seem like they’re almost presented as concessions. I could try to get into some responses chosen by you if that would be helpful.
Also (crossposted to shortform):
I think the use of dialogues to illustrate a point of view is overdone on LessWrong. Almost always, the ‘Simplicio’ character fails to accurately represent the smart version of the viewpoint he stands in for, because the author doesn’t try sufficiently hard to pass the ITT of the view they’re arguing against. As a result, not only is the dialogue unconvincing, it runs the risk of misleading readers about the actual content of a worldview. I think this is true to a greater extent than posts that just state a point of view and argue against it, because the dialogue format naively appears to actually represent a named representative of a point of view, and structurally discourages disclaimers of the type “as I understand it, defenders of proposition P might state X, but of course I could be wrong”.
I’m a little confused by this one, because in your previous response you say that you think Bob accurately represents Eliezer’s position, and now you seem to be complaining about the opposite?
Actually, I think the synthesis is that many of the things that Bob is saying are implications of Eliezer’s description and ways of getting close to Bayesian reasoning, but seem like they’re almost presented as concessions. I could try to get into some responses chosen by you if that would be helpful.
A lot of Bob’s responses seem like natural consequences of Eliezer’s claim, but some of them aren’t.