The halo effect is when your brain tricks you in to collapsing all of a person’s varied attributes and abilities in to a single dimension of how much you respect them. Dan Quayle’s success in politics provides limited evidence that he’s a good speller. Satoshi Nakamoto’s high status as the inventor of Bitcoin provides limited evidence that he is good looking. Justin Bieber’s success as a pop star provides limited evidence that he’s good at math. Etc.
Elon Musk is famous for being an extremely accomplished in the hi-tech world. This provides strong evidence that Musk is “competent”. “Trustworthy” I’m not as sure about.
Less Wrong users can be highly rational and make accurate predictions worth listening to while lacking “fundamental social skills”.
An individual Less Wronger who has lots of great ideas and writes well online might be too socially anxious to be a good conversationalist.
I was being very generous in my post. Less Wrong has many people that have megalomaniac tendencies. This would be almost impossible to argue against. I gave a wide margin and said many great people, but to pretend that there aren’t illegitimate people who hide and are many in number is something else entirely.
Elon Musk is certainly trustworthy. You can calculate trustworthiness via amount of accumulated capital because the effect trust has on said serial accumulation.
You have referenced relatively elementary mistakes that do not apply in this situation. Your examples are extremely off base
Dan Quayle as a good speller is irrelevant and unbelievable that is not even in the same ballpark of what I was saying
Satoshi Nakamoto being good looking because of his invention is ridiculous
Just Bieber example is worse.
Social approximation is far more robust than peoples assumed identities and online persona’s. I am not foolishly judging people randomly. Most of the “effective altruists” you meet are complete pushovers and if they wish to justify their megalomaniac tendencies constantly going on and on about how effective they are, they should be able to put their foot down and stop bad people and set boundaries, or cut the effective act until they are able to.
They use their “effective altruism” to make up for the fact of the huge ethical opportunity costs they miss by what they DO NOT do. They then engage in extremely obscurant arguments as cover.
As an example see the lack of ethics that many people complain about in mathematics ie Grothendieck or Perelman.
Mathematicians trends towards passivity and probably are “good people” but they do not stop their peers in engaging unethical behavior and thus that is the sordid state of mathematics. Stopping bad people is primary, doing good things is second. Effective altruism is incomplete until they admit that it is not doing good things, but stopping bad things, and you need a robust personality structure to do so.
The halo effect is when your brain tricks you in to collapsing all of a person’s varied attributes and abilities in to a single dimension of how much you respect them. Dan Quayle’s success in politics provides limited evidence that he’s a good speller. Satoshi Nakamoto’s high status as the inventor of Bitcoin provides limited evidence that he is good looking. Justin Bieber’s success as a pop star provides limited evidence that he’s good at math. Etc.
Elon Musk is famous for being an extremely accomplished in the hi-tech world. This provides strong evidence that Musk is “competent”. “Trustworthy” I’m not as sure about.
Less Wrong users can be highly rational and make accurate predictions worth listening to while lacking “fundamental social skills”.
An individual Less Wronger who has lots of great ideas and writes well online might be too socially anxious to be a good conversationalist.
I was being very generous in my post. Less Wrong has many people that have megalomaniac tendencies. This would be almost impossible to argue against. I gave a wide margin and said many great people, but to pretend that there aren’t illegitimate people who hide and are many in number is something else entirely.
Elon Musk is certainly trustworthy. You can calculate trustworthiness via amount of accumulated capital because the effect trust has on said serial accumulation.
You have referenced relatively elementary mistakes that do not apply in this situation. Your examples are extremely off base
Dan Quayle as a good speller is irrelevant and unbelievable that is not even in the same ballpark of what I was saying
Satoshi Nakamoto being good looking because of his invention is ridiculous
Just Bieber example is worse.
Social approximation is far more robust than peoples assumed identities and online persona’s. I am not foolishly judging people randomly. Most of the “effective altruists” you meet are complete pushovers and if they wish to justify their megalomaniac tendencies constantly going on and on about how effective they are, they should be able to put their foot down and stop bad people and set boundaries, or cut the effective act until they are able to.
They use their “effective altruism” to make up for the fact of the huge ethical opportunity costs they miss by what they DO NOT do. They then engage in extremely obscurant arguments as cover.
As an example see the lack of ethics that many people complain about in mathematics ie Grothendieck or Perelman.
Mathematicians trends towards passivity and probably are “good people” but they do not stop their peers in engaging unethical behavior and thus that is the sordid state of mathematics. Stopping bad people is primary, doing good things is second. Effective altruism is incomplete until they admit that it is not doing good things, but stopping bad things, and you need a robust personality structure to do so.