There are some views of Yudkowsky I don’t necessarily agree with, and none of them have anything to do with him having or not having a PhD.
Would you be more inclined to agree with him if he did in fact have a PhD (in the relevant fields)? If your (honest) answer to this question is “yes”, then your rejection does have something to do with him not having a PhD.
Are you sure this type of rejection (or excuse of a rejection) is common and significant?
Based on personal experience, I would say so, yes.
I’d be more inclined to agree with him if he was God, too, but I wouldn’t say “my rejection of his ideas has something to do with the fact that he is not God”. For that matter I would be more inclined to agree with him if he used mind control rays on me, but “I reject Eliezer’s ideas partly because he isn’t using a mind control ray on me” would be a ludicrous thing to say.
“My rejection has to do with X” connotes more than just a Bayseian probability estimate.
Both of your hypothetical statements are correct, and both of them would be bad reasons to believe something (well, I’m a bit fuzzy on the God hypothetical—is God defined as always correct?), just as the presence or absence of a PhD would be a bad reason to believe something. (This is not to say that PhD’s offer zero evidence one way or the other, but rather that the evidence they offer is often overwhelmed by other, more immediate factors.) The phrasing of your comment gives me the impression that you’re trying to express disagreement with me about something, but I can’t detect any actual disagreement. Could you clarify your intent for me here? Thanks in advance.
I disagree that if you would be less likely to reject his ideas if X were true, that can always be usefully described as “my rejection has something to do with X”. The statement “my rejection has something to do with X” literally means “I would be less likely to reject it if X were true”, but it does not connote that.
Generally, that you would be less likely to reject it if X were true, and a couple of other ideas:
X is specific to your rejectiion—that is, that the truthfulness of X affects the probability of your rejection to a much larger degree than it affects the probability of other propositions that are conceptually distant.
The line of reasoning from X to reducing the probability of your rejection proceeds through certain types of connections, such as ones that are conceptually closer.
The effect of X is not too small, where “not to small” depends on how strongly the other factors apply.
(Human beings, of course, have lots of fuzzy concepts.)
An interesting question, and not an easy one to answer in the way I could be sure you understood the same thing what I meant.
My original thought when composing the comment was that it never occurred to me that “he doesn’t have a PhD so his opinion is less worth”, and I would never use the fact that he doesn’t have a PhD, neither in an assumed debate with him nor for any self-assurance.
This means that even if I answered with a “clear yes” to your question, it still wouldn’t mean that it was the cause of the rejection.
Loss of credit because he doesn’t have a PhD does not necessarily equal the gain of credit because he does have a PhD. Yes, I realize that this is the most attackable sentence in my answer.
The disagreements are more centered on personal opinion, morality, philosophical interpretation, opinion about culture and/or religion, and in part on interpreting history. So, mostly soft sciences. This means that there would be no relevant PhD in these cases (a PhD in a philosophical field wouldn’t matter to me as a deciding factor)
On the other hand, if it was a scientific field, then I might unconsciously have given him a little higher probability of being right if he did have a PhD in the field, but this would be dwarfed by the much larger probability gain caused by him actually working in the relevant field, PhD or not. As of yet I don’t have any really opposite views about any of his scientific views. Maybe I hold some possible future events a little more or less probable, or am unsure in things he is very sure about, but the conclusion is: I don’t have scientific disagreements with him as of yet.
About whether this type of rejection is common: if we take my explanation at the beginning of this answer, then I guess it is uncommon to reject him in that way (and his article might lean a tiny little bit in the direction of a strawman argument: “they only disagree because they think it’s important that I don’t have a PhD, so this means they just don’t have better excuses”). If we take your definition, then I agree that it might be higher.
The two comments you and Jiro wrote while composing mine actually made me think about a possibly unclear formulation: I should have written “are not based in any significant way on” instead of “don’t have anything to do with”.
You actually just described what I wrote as:
“Loss of credit because he doesn’t have a PhD does not necessarily equal the gain of credit because he does have a PhD”
Would you be more inclined to agree with him if he did in fact have a PhD (in the relevant fields)? If your (honest) answer to this question is “yes”, then your rejection does have something to do with him not having a PhD.
Based on personal experience, I would say so, yes.
I’d be more inclined to agree with him if he was God, too, but I wouldn’t say “my rejection of his ideas has something to do with the fact that he is not God”. For that matter I would be more inclined to agree with him if he used mind control rays on me, but “I reject Eliezer’s ideas partly because he isn’t using a mind control ray on me” would be a ludicrous thing to say.
“My rejection has to do with X” connotes more than just a Bayseian probability estimate.
Both of your hypothetical statements are correct, and both of them would be bad reasons to believe something (well, I’m a bit fuzzy on the God hypothetical—is God defined as always correct?), just as the presence or absence of a PhD would be a bad reason to believe something. (This is not to say that PhD’s offer zero evidence one way or the other, but rather that the evidence they offer is often overwhelmed by other, more immediate factors.) The phrasing of your comment gives me the impression that you’re trying to express disagreement with me about something, but I can’t detect any actual disagreement. Could you clarify your intent for me here? Thanks in advance.
I disagree that if you would be less likely to reject his ideas if X were true, that can always be usefully described as “my rejection has something to do with X”. The statement “my rejection has something to do with X” literally means “I would be less likely to reject it if X were true”, but it does not connote that.
All right, I can accept that. So what does it connote, by your reckoning?
Generally, that you would be less likely to reject it if X were true, and a couple of other ideas:
X is specific to your rejectiion—that is, that the truthfulness of X affects the probability of your rejection to a much larger degree than it affects the probability of other propositions that are conceptually distant.
The line of reasoning from X to reducing the probability of your rejection proceeds through certain types of connections, such as ones that are conceptually closer.
The effect of X is not too small, where “not to small” depends on how strongly the other factors apply.
(Human beings, of course, have lots of fuzzy concepts.)
An interesting question, and not an easy one to answer in the way I could be sure you understood the same thing what I meant.
My original thought when composing the comment was that it never occurred to me that “he doesn’t have a PhD so his opinion is less worth”, and I would never use the fact that he doesn’t have a PhD, neither in an assumed debate with him nor for any self-assurance. This means that even if I answered with a “clear yes” to your question, it still wouldn’t mean that it was the cause of the rejection.
Loss of credit because he doesn’t have a PhD does not necessarily equal the gain of credit because he does have a PhD. Yes, I realize that this is the most attackable sentence in my answer.
The disagreements are more centered on personal opinion, morality, philosophical interpretation, opinion about culture and/or religion, and in part on interpreting history. So, mostly soft sciences. This means that there would be no relevant PhD in these cases (a PhD in a philosophical field wouldn’t matter to me as a deciding factor)
On the other hand, if it was a scientific field, then I might unconsciously have given him a little higher probability of being right if he did have a PhD in the field, but this would be dwarfed by the much larger probability gain caused by him actually working in the relevant field, PhD or not. As of yet I don’t have any really opposite views about any of his scientific views. Maybe I hold some possible future events a little more or less probable, or am unsure in things he is very sure about, but the conclusion is: I don’t have scientific disagreements with him as of yet.
About whether this type of rejection is common: if we take my explanation at the beginning of this answer, then I guess it is uncommon to reject him in that way (and his article might lean a tiny little bit in the direction of a strawman argument: “they only disagree because they think it’s important that I don’t have a PhD, so this means they just don’t have better excuses”). If we take your definition, then I agree that it might be higher.
The two comments you and Jiro wrote while composing mine actually made me think about a possibly unclear formulation: I should have written “are not based in any significant way on” instead of “don’t have anything to do with”.
You actually just described what I wrote as: “Loss of credit because he doesn’t have a PhD does not necessarily equal the gain of credit because he does have a PhD”