Apparent poorly grounded belief in SI’s superior general rationality
I found this complaint insufficiently detailed and not well worded.
Average people think their rationality is moderately good. Average people are not very rational. SI affiliated people think they are adept or at least adequate at rationality. SI affiliated people are not complete disasters at rationality.
SI affiliated people are vastly superior to others in generally rationality. So the original complaint literally interpreted is false.
An interesting question might be on the level of: “Do SI affiliates have rationality superior to what the average person falsely believes his or her rationality is?”
Holden’s complaints each have their apparent legitimacy change differently under his and my beliefs. Some have to do with overconfidence or incorrect self-assessment, others with other-assessment, others with comparing SI people to others. Some of them:
Insufficient self-skepticism given how strong its claims are
Largely agree, as this relates to overconfidence.
...and how little support its claims have won.
Moderately disagree, as this relies on the rationality of others.
Being too selective (in terms of looking for people who share its preconceptions) when determining whom to hire and whose feedback to take seriously.
Largely disagree, as this relies significantly on the competence of others.
Paying insufficient attention to the limitations of the confidence one can have in one’s untested theories, in line with my Objection 1.
Largely agree, as this depends more on accurate assessment of one’s on rationality.
Rather than endorsing “Others have not accepted our arguments, so we will sharpen and/or reexamine our arguments,” SI seems often to endorse something more like “Others have not accepted their arguments because they have inferior general rationality,” a stance less likely to lead to improvement on SI’s part.
There is instrumental value in falsely believing others to have a good basis for disagreement so one’s search for reasons one might be wrong is enhanced. This is aside from the actual reasons of others.
It is easy to imagine an expert in a relevant field objecting to SI based on something SI does or says seeming wrong, only to have the expert couch the objection in literally false terms, perhaps ones that flow from motivated cognition and bear no trace of the real, relevant reason for the objection. This could be followed by SI’s evaluation and dismissal of it and failure of a type not actually predicted by the expert...all such nuances are lost in the literally false “Apparent poorly grounded belief in SI’s superior general rationality.”
Such a failure comes to mind and is easy for me to imagine as I think this is a major reason why “Lack of impressive endorsements” is a problem. The reasons provided by experts for disagreeing with SI on particular issues are often terrible, but such expressions are merely what they believe their objections to be, and their expertise is in math or some such, not in knowing why they think what they think.
I found this complaint insufficiently detailed and not well worded.
Average people think their rationality is moderately good. Average people are not very rational. SI affiliated people think they are adept or at least adequate at rationality. SI affiliated people are not complete disasters at rationality.
SI affiliated people are vastly superior to others in generally rationality. So the original complaint literally interpreted is false.
An interesting question might be on the level of: “Do SI affiliates have rationality superior to what the average person falsely believes his or her rationality is?”
Holden’s complaints each have their apparent legitimacy change differently under his and my beliefs. Some have to do with overconfidence or incorrect self-assessment, others with other-assessment, others with comparing SI people to others. Some of them:
Largely agree, as this relates to overconfidence.
Moderately disagree, as this relies on the rationality of others.
Largely disagree, as this relies significantly on the competence of others.
Largely agree, as this depends more on accurate assessment of one’s on rationality.
There is instrumental value in falsely believing others to have a good basis for disagreement so one’s search for reasons one might be wrong is enhanced. This is aside from the actual reasons of others.
It is easy to imagine an expert in a relevant field objecting to SI based on something SI does or says seeming wrong, only to have the expert couch the objection in literally false terms, perhaps ones that flow from motivated cognition and bear no trace of the real, relevant reason for the objection. This could be followed by SI’s evaluation and dismissal of it and failure of a type not actually predicted by the expert...all such nuances are lost in the literally false “Apparent poorly grounded belief in SI’s superior general rationality.”
Such a failure comes to mind and is easy for me to imagine as I think this is a major reason why “Lack of impressive endorsements” is a problem. The reasons provided by experts for disagreeing with SI on particular issues are often terrible, but such expressions are merely what they believe their objections to be, and their expertise is in math or some such, not in knowing why they think what they think.