I spent many hours explaining a sub-set of these criticisms to you in Dolores Park soon after we first met, but it strongly seemed to me that that time was wasted. I appreciate that you want to be lawful in your approach to reason, and thus to engage with disagreement, but my impression was that you do not actually engage with disagreement, you merely want to engage with disagreement, basically, I felt that you believe in your belief in rational inquiry, but that you don’t actually believe in rational inquiry.
I may, of course, be wrong, and I’m not sure how people should respond in such a situation. It strongly seems to me that a) leftist movements tend to collapse in schizm, b) rightist movements tend to converge on generic xenophobic authoritarianism regardless of their associated theory. I’d rather we avoid both of those situations, but the first seems like an inevitable result of not accommodating belief in belief, while the second seems like an inevitable result of accommodating it. My instinct is that the best option is to not accommodate belief in belief and to keep a movement small enough that schizm can be avoided. The worst thing for an epistemic standard is not the person who ignores or denies it, but the person who tries to mostly follow it when doing so feels right or is convenient while not acknowledging that they aren’t following it when it feels weird or inconvenient, as that leads to a community of people with such standards engaging in double-think WRT whether their standards call for weird or inconvenient behavior. OTOH, my best guess is that about 50 people is as far as you can get with my proposed approach.
What I mostly remember from that conversation was disagreeing about the likely consequences of “actually trying”. You thought elite people in the EA cluster who actually tried had high probability of much more extreme achievements than I did. I see how that fits into this post, but I didn’t know you had loads of other criticism about EA, and I probably would have had a pretty different conversation with you if I did.
Fair enough regarding how you want to spend your time. I think you’re mistaken about how open I am to changing my mind about things in the face of arguments, and I hope that you reconsider. I believe that if you consulted with people you trust who know me much better than you, you’d find they have different opinions about me than you do. There are multiple cases where detailed engagement with criticism has substantially changed my operations.
I’m partially unsure if I should be commenting here since I do not know Nick that well, or the other matters that could be involved in this discussion. Those two points nevertheless, not only it seems to me that your impression of him is mistaken, but that the truth lies in the exact opposite direction. If you check his posts and other writings, it seems he has the remarkable habit of taking into consideration many opposing views (e.g.: his thesis) and also putting a whole more weight into others opinions (e.g.: common as sense as a prior) than the average here at LW. I would gather others must have, at worst, a different opinion of him than the one you presented, otherwise he wouldn’t be in the positions he’s right now, both at FHI and GWWC.
That’s my two cents. Not even sure if he would agree with all of it, but I would image some data points wouldn’t do harm.
I spent many hours explaining a sub-set of these criticisms to you in Dolores Park soon after we first met, but it strongly seemed to me that that time was wasted. I appreciate that you want to be lawful in your approach to reason, and thus to engage with disagreement, but my impression was that you do not actually engage with disagreement, you merely want to engage with disagreement, basically, I felt that you believe in your belief in rational inquiry, but that you don’t actually believe in rational inquiry.
I may, of course, be wrong, and I’m not sure how people should respond in such a situation. It strongly seems to me that a) leftist movements tend to collapse in schizm, b) rightist movements tend to converge on generic xenophobic authoritarianism regardless of their associated theory. I’d rather we avoid both of those situations, but the first seems like an inevitable result of not accommodating belief in belief, while the second seems like an inevitable result of accommodating it. My instinct is that the best option is to not accommodate belief in belief and to keep a movement small enough that schizm can be avoided. The worst thing for an epistemic standard is not the person who ignores or denies it, but the person who tries to mostly follow it when doing so feels right or is convenient while not acknowledging that they aren’t following it when it feels weird or inconvenient, as that leads to a community of people with such standards engaging in double-think WRT whether their standards call for weird or inconvenient behavior. OTOH, my best guess is that about 50 people is as far as you can get with my proposed approach.
What I mostly remember from that conversation was disagreeing about the likely consequences of “actually trying”. You thought elite people in the EA cluster who actually tried had high probability of much more extreme achievements than I did. I see how that fits into this post, but I didn’t know you had loads of other criticism about EA, and I probably would have had a pretty different conversation with you if I did.
Fair enough regarding how you want to spend your time. I think you’re mistaken about how open I am to changing my mind about things in the face of arguments, and I hope that you reconsider. I believe that if you consulted with people you trust who know me much better than you, you’d find they have different opinions about me than you do. There are multiple cases where detailed engagement with criticism has substantially changed my operations.
I’m partially unsure if I should be commenting here since I do not know Nick that well, or the other matters that could be involved in this discussion. Those two points nevertheless, not only it seems to me that your impression of him is mistaken, but that the truth lies in the exact opposite direction. If you check his posts and other writings, it seems he has the remarkable habit of taking into consideration many opposing views (e.g.: his thesis) and also putting a whole more weight into others opinions (e.g.: common as sense as a prior) than the average here at LW. I would gather others must have, at worst, a different opinion of him than the one you presented, otherwise he wouldn’t be in the positions he’s right now, both at FHI and GWWC. That’s my two cents. Not even sure if he would agree with all of it, but I would image some data points wouldn’t do harm.