First, please avoid even a well-intentioned discussion of politics here (Krugman is as political as it gets), as you will likely alienate a large chunk of your readers.
As for predictions, you are probably out of luck for anything convincing. Note that the AI and singularity research are not expected to provide any useful predictions for decades, the quantum sequence was meant as a background for other topics, and not as original research. Cognitive science and philosophy are the two areas where one can conceivable claim that EY made original contributions to. And the former is the only one of the two that can possibly come up with falsifiable predictions.
It would be awfully nice if someone did itemize EY’s original research in cognitive science and suggested what testable predictions it can make, but I am not aware of anything like that having been attempted.
(I had a longish comment here defending the politics taboo, then decided to remove it, because I’ve found that in the past the responses to defenses of the politics taboo, and the responses to those responses, have done too much damage to justify making such defenses. Please, though, don’t interpret my silence from now on as assent to what looks to me like the continuing erosion or maybe insufficiently rapid strengthening of site quality norms.)
Civility and topicality of a discussion isn’t a measure of how mind-killed that discussion is. I personally very much doubt that I could have discussed Krugman rationally, had I entered the discussion, though I certainly would have been polite about it.
This has no consequence on whether politics is genuinely a mind-killer. I include this disclaimer because it has just occurred to me that (ironically) perhaps the “politics is a mind-killer” issue might be becoming LW’s first really political issue, and prompt all the standard arguments-as-soldiers failures of rationality.
I really did mean “how much of a mind-killer”. We can handle mentions of politics better than some think, but (for example) voting vs. not voting + which candidate is the better/less worse choice would be a lot harder.
Thomblake and I both noted that “politics is the mindkiller” is the mindkiller a few months ago. It would be nice if we could possibly ease off a bit on behaving quite so phobically about actually practical matters that people would be interested in applying rationality to, if we can stop it turning the site into a sea of blue and green.
Nice post, but I think even that may not go far enough. Eliezer’s original post didn’t distinguish carefully between gratuitous “digs” and using political examples to illustrate a point. In this thread, if the issue of the success of political commentators in making predictions is a topic perpetualpeace1 knows well, it isn’t necessarily wrong for him to use it as an example.
If a substantial portion of LW readers are stopping reading when the encounter a thought on politics they dislike, might be worth confronting that problem directly.
One reason not to use political examples to illustrate a (nonpolitical) point is that it invites a lot of distracting nitpicking from those who identify with the targeted political group.
But another is that if you’re trying to make a normative point to a broad audience, then alienating one subset and elevating another — for no good reason — is a losing strategy.
For instance, if you want to talk to people about improving rationality, and you use an example that revolves around some Marxists being irrational and some Georgists being rational, then a lot of the Marxists in the audience are just going to stop listening or get pissed off. But also, a lot of the Georgists are going to feel that they get “rationality points” just for being Georgists.
That’s why I did not repeat the cached rote admonition, but tried to explain why I did not think it was a good idea in this case. I’m happy to have been proven wrong in this particular instance, probably because most regulars here know to steer clear from getting sucked into “right vs left” debates.
First, please avoid even a well-intentioned discussion of politics here (Krugman is as political as it gets), as you will likely alienate a large chunk of your readers.
As for predictions, you are probably out of luck for anything convincing. Note that the AI and singularity research are not expected to provide any useful predictions for decades, the quantum sequence was meant as a background for other topics, and not as original research. Cognitive science and philosophy are the two areas where one can conceivable claim that EY made original contributions to. And the former is the only one of the two that can possibly come up with falsifiable predictions.
It would be awfully nice if someone did itemize EY’s original research in cognitive science and suggested what testable predictions it can make, but I am not aware of anything like that having been attempted.
We may need to update just how much of a mind-killer politics is here. The Krugman discussion stayed civil and on-topic.
(I had a longish comment here defending the politics taboo, then decided to remove it, because I’ve found that in the past the responses to defenses of the politics taboo, and the responses to those responses, have done too much damage to justify making such defenses. Please, though, don’t interpret my silence from now on as assent to what looks to me like the continuing erosion or maybe insufficiently rapid strengthening of site quality norms.)
Civility and topicality of a discussion isn’t a measure of how mind-killed that discussion is. I personally very much doubt that I could have discussed Krugman rationally, had I entered the discussion, though I certainly would have been polite about it.
This has no consequence on whether politics is genuinely a mind-killer. I include this disclaimer because it has just occurred to me that (ironically) perhaps the “politics is a mind-killer” issue might be becoming LW’s first really political issue, and prompt all the standard arguments-as-soldiers failures of rationality.
What do you mean by mind-killing? Maybe no forward movement towards better understanding?
I really did mean “how much of a mind-killer”. We can handle mentions of politics better than some think, but (for example) voting vs. not voting + which candidate is the better/less worse choice would be a lot harder.
I think at LW, uttering rote admonitions has become a bigger mindkiller than politics itself.
Thomblake and I both noted that “politics is the mindkiller” is the mindkiller a few months ago. It would be nice if we could possibly ease off a bit on behaving quite so phobically about actually practical matters that people would be interested in applying rationality to, if we can stop it turning the site into a sea of blue and green.
Nice post, but I think even that may not go far enough. Eliezer’s original post didn’t distinguish carefully between gratuitous “digs” and using political examples to illustrate a point. In this thread, if the issue of the success of political commentators in making predictions is a topic perpetualpeace1 knows well, it isn’t necessarily wrong for him to use it as an example.
If a substantial portion of LW readers are stopping reading when the encounter a thought on politics they dislike, might be worth confronting that problem directly.
One reason not to use political examples to illustrate a (nonpolitical) point is that it invites a lot of distracting nitpicking from those who identify with the targeted political group.
But another is that if you’re trying to make a normative point to a broad audience, then alienating one subset and elevating another — for no good reason — is a losing strategy.
For instance, if you want to talk to people about improving rationality, and you use an example that revolves around some Marxists being irrational and some Georgists being rational, then a lot of the Marxists in the audience are just going to stop listening or get pissed off. But also, a lot of the Georgists are going to feel that they get “rationality points” just for being Georgists.
That’s why I did not repeat the cached rote admonition, but tried to explain why I did not think it was a good idea in this case. I’m happy to have been proven wrong in this particular instance, probably because most regulars here know to steer clear from getting sucked into “right vs left” debates.