I should note that my interest in sharing the FB posts is that they render “Duncan’s claim to rare insight” discussable. I don’t expect them to move my opinion much because we’re FB friends, and I see many of them already.
Now that you’ve acknowledged that this is fair to assess in its own right, I’d like to share my current assessment of your insight levels:
You have at least once said things I found extremely novel and useful, although still had major disagreements with. I shared the first part with you privately, although did not update you when I developed more concerns about the model.
You have at least once waged a major campaign alone at great social cost, that I appreciate a great deal and respected a lot. I already shared this one privately with you but it seems worth noting in public.
Your FB is a mix of things I agree with and disagree with. Some of the disagreements I might change my mind on if we could have a good discussion, and under other circumstances I would be really excited to have those discussions, because I care about this a lot too and people paying sufficient attention are rare. But I (almost?) never do, because just the thought makes me feel weary. I expect the conversations to be incredibly high friction with no chance of movement on your part. I expect this feeling to be common, and for that lack of feedback to be detrimental to your model building even if you start out far above average.
One counterargument is that there are lots of comments on those posts. That’s true, and maybe they’re covering all the bases, but I would be surprised.
A reasonable question here is if losing those discussions represents lost value to you. I can point you to public twitter threads of mine I think you would find interesting, and to a pseudonymous blog if you agree to limited anonymity we can discuss out of band.
It is only in writing this up that I realized how much lost value this represents to me: I do think if friction was low enough we’d have really interesting discussions we both learned from.
Things that contribute to that feeling of friction
In one private interaction where we disagreed on a norm, your frame was “you [Elizabeth’s] frame is impossibly bad and meta-uncooperative”
You’ve repeatedly deleted posts on LW and FB, in what sure looked like anger.
General sense from reading your LW and FB posts/comments, although I haven’t done a quantified assessment here.
I remember on FB post claiming you were good at receiving feedback, which given my priors means you have so thoroughly discouraged feedback you’re not aware of the scope of the problem.
I guess my overall claim here is not that you don’t have useful insight- you do- but that your certainty in the superiority of that insight reduces your ability to iterate and correct, and nobody can get everything right on the first try.
I do not have, and do not believe I have claimed to have, anything like “certainty in the superiority of my insight.” Happy to just state here explicitly: I don’t have anything like certainty in the superiority of my insight.
What I have is confidence that, when I’m perceiving that something is going sideways, something is, in fact, going sideways.
That’s a far cry from always knowing what it is, which is itself a far cry from having any idea how to fix it.
I’m confused as to how I’m perceived as claiming superiority of insight when e.g. all I could come up with in the above essay was a set of ideas that I myself identified as terrible and insufficient.
My comment is low context both because I don’t think I’ve seen you and Elizabeth talk before and also because I only skimmed the parent comments.
When you say
I’m confused as to how I’m perceived as claiming superiority of insight when e.g. all I could come up with in the above essay was a set of ideas that I myself identified as terrible and insufficient.
This doesn’t seem to me evidence against you claiming to have superior insight under Elizabeth’s usage of the term. My reading is that she uses the term relatively, I.e. that she believes that you believe your claims about the world are right while others’ claims are wrong (or more likely to be true than others’). Terrible, as you used it in the essay, I took to be in absolute terms, as in “will these interventions help? Idk”
I’m more confident in the quote not providing evidence against her usage of “superior insight” than I am in defining her intended meaning.
I should note that my interest in sharing the FB posts is that they render “Duncan’s claim to rare insight” discussable. I don’t expect them to move my opinion much because we’re FB friends, and I see many of them already.
Now that you’ve acknowledged that this is fair to assess in its own right, I’d like to share my current assessment of your insight levels:
You have at least once said things I found extremely novel and useful, although still had major disagreements with. I shared the first part with you privately, although did not update you when I developed more concerns about the model.
You have at least once waged a major campaign alone at great social cost, that I appreciate a great deal and respected a lot. I already shared this one privately with you but it seems worth noting in public.
Your FB is a mix of things I agree with and disagree with. Some of the disagreements I might change my mind on if we could have a good discussion, and under other circumstances I would be really excited to have those discussions, because I care about this a lot too and people paying sufficient attention are rare. But I (almost?) never do, because just the thought makes me feel weary. I expect the conversations to be incredibly high friction with no chance of movement on your part. I expect this feeling to be common, and for that lack of feedback to be detrimental to your model building even if you start out far above average.
One counterargument is that there are lots of comments on those posts. That’s true, and maybe they’re covering all the bases, but I would be surprised.
A reasonable question here is if losing those discussions represents lost value to you. I can point you to public twitter threads of mine I think you would find interesting, and to a pseudonymous blog if you agree to limited anonymity we can discuss out of band.
It is only in writing this up that I realized how much lost value this represents to me: I do think if friction was low enough we’d have really interesting discussions we both learned from.
Things that contribute to that feeling of friction
In one private interaction where we disagreed on a norm, your frame was “you [Elizabeth’s] frame is impossibly bad and meta-uncooperative”
You’ve repeatedly deleted posts on LW and FB, in what sure looked like anger.
General sense from reading your LW and FB posts/comments, although I haven’t done a quantified assessment here.
I remember on FB post claiming you were good at receiving feedback, which given my priors means you have so thoroughly discouraged feedback you’re not aware of the scope of the problem.
I guess my overall claim here is not that you don’t have useful insight- you do- but that your certainty in the superiority of that insight reduces your ability to iterate and correct, and nobody can get everything right on the first try.
I do not have, and do not believe I have claimed to have, anything like “certainty in the superiority of my insight.” Happy to just state here explicitly: I don’t have anything like certainty in the superiority of my insight.
What I have is confidence that, when I’m perceiving that something is going sideways, something is, in fact, going sideways.
That’s a far cry from always knowing what it is, which is itself a far cry from having any idea how to fix it.
I’m confused as to how I’m perceived as claiming superiority of insight when e.g. all I could come up with in the above essay was a set of ideas that I myself identified as terrible and insufficient.
My comment is low context both because I don’t think I’ve seen you and Elizabeth talk before and also because I only skimmed the parent comments.
When you say
This doesn’t seem to me evidence against you claiming to have superior insight under Elizabeth’s usage of the term. My reading is that she uses the term relatively, I.e. that she believes that you believe your claims about the world are right while others’ claims are wrong (or more likely to be true than others’). Terrible, as you used it in the essay, I took to be in absolute terms, as in “will these interventions help? Idk”
I’m more confident in the quote not providing evidence against her usage of “superior insight” than I am in defining her intended meaning.