When did you contact me via other means? Was it by email?
Yes, around the time I posted it. I don’t care if you find this implausible; I didn’t find your claims of never having seen my requests plausible either. I don’t have time to substantiate this claim either; I’m too busy.
After all, it was an announcement post, not a ‘let’s discuss topic X’ post or a post that asked questions and expected replies.
People usually expect comments on topics they start; I don’t know why you would expect otherwise just because it’s “an announcement post”. It’s the Olympus mentality that says, “I talk, you listen, replies not wanted.” It’s the mentality that replies defensively to any cross-examination of evidence you’ve presented.
Anna took the time to write up some quantitative results from our exit survey. I haven’t seen you either thank her for answering your request or give a different reply yet.
She also included testimonials as to my own effectiveness during minicamp, and other minicampers have given their own (positive) accounts. You haven’t replied to any of those.
I listed the preliminary evidence that led me to call minicamp a success, and you didn’t reply to that subthread yet. …
You wanted to see the testimonials, and Anna posted them, and you didn’t say thanks or reply to that yet either.
I didn’t assign those high priority for a reply because others already said what I would have said in reply, and it was becoming clear that I was not alone in being suspicious of this evidence.
I also didn’t ask to see testimonials because I didn’t consider those strong evidence for what you’re claiming—like others noted, they don’t really distinguish you from any other self-help camp.
I explained that further data measuring the effects of minicamp on its participants was still being gathered, but that this takes time and SI lacks available staff hours.
And I explained that you don’t get to play “evidence takes time!” while saying, “yep, I already have enough evidence to call this a success and ignore any questioning of this claim”.
In a reply to you, jsalvatier linked to additional earlier positive testimonials, to which you also did not reply.
What was there to reply to? “Oh, well, since you personally feel you had a good time, I guess I shouldn’t be suspicious that it improved anyone’s rationality”?
At first you said you would volunteer, but then you apparently withdrew the offer.
I said I would pay the ransom you’re demanding for your evidence. That was the only reason I was willing to help you. I never withdrew any offer; rather, you tried to change the topic to helping with your research, which I don’t want to do, never did, and never offered to.
As others have said, your objections have been addressed and it’s hard to see why you’re still unsatisfied for now. Could you explain?
Those are regarding a different thread and different claim; there’s nothing to explain here, and I’d appreciate if you didn’t misreport evidence.
Also keep in mind jsalvatier’s comment:
Sure thing—and you can keep it in mind too, when using increasingly strong superlatives to describe our success.
Despite multiplerequests to drop this discussion, I’d like to put a little more effort toward mutual understanding. Perhaps I’m irrationally optimistic for reconciliation and convergence.
Others have addressed the unproductive ‘attack-mode’ nature of your comments; I won’t address that here. Suffice it to say that I have plenty to learn myself about communicating diplomatically.
I also won’t say much more on the issue of my not having seen your earlier calls for evidence of minicamp’s success. I can only repeat: If you want to be sure I’ll read a particular comment, make sure you contact me directly or reply to one of my comments so that your comment shows up in the LW inbox. I do not have time to keep revisiting old posts and reading all comments made on them, and I kinda doubt anyone thinks that is the best use of my limited time when I could instead be doing research and academic outreach related to rationality and FAI theory. You may insist on attributing this to my ‘Olympus Mentality’, though I’ll try to dissuade you of this interpretation below.
As for your definite accusation that I lied when I said I hadn’t seen your earlier comments on the topic, it remains the case that I never replied to them, and they seem like comments I would have replied to given my well-documented defensiveness on LW. Just notice how tenaciously I’ve defended myself in this discussion, despite a continuous slew of character attacks.
As for your accusation that I strawmanned you, I tried to explain that unless I had a policy of checking tons of old posts for new comments it’s not clear I would have seen your original comment, but you seem to simply disagree, so I don’t think there’s much more to say about that.
Finally, you seem to have suggested that I said I made announcement posts “we’re not supposed to discuss, or argue about, or criticize, or question, or whine about—like the mini-camp results topic”, but that’s just not true. You’re welcome to discuss, argue, criticize, question, or whine about anything I post on Less Wrong. All I said was that I don’t go back and check every post for new comments, and that if you want to make sure I read something you should contact me directly or be sure to reply directly to one of my comments so that I see it in my LW inbox.
A ‘Successful’ Minicamp
jsalvatier has repeatedly suggested that we may have different ideas of what I meant when I wrote that Rationality Minicamp was a success.
As KPier wrote in response to what seems to be your original comment on this topic, “The article pretty clearly states that the claims about the effects of the camp were based on exit surveys, and that the impact of the camp is demonstrated by the projects the camp grads are now working on. You could debate whether those are good measures, but we don’t exactly have better ones.” Later, Anna and myself gave that specific evidence in more detail.
You might be willing to concede that the evidence from exit surveys and testimonials provide about as much evidence of minicamp ‘success’ as such measures are capable of providing, though that may not be much. Is that true?
But of course, you’ve been asking for stronger evidence. You’d like to see measures of rationality improvement or life success or something like that. I addressed this exact request directly in my very first comment on the topic:
We collected lots of data before and during minicamp. We are waiting for some time to pass before collecting followup data, because it takes time for people’s lives to change, if they’re going to change...
...we are still gathering data… before-and-after results will have to wait a while...
You replied that if these stronger forms of evidence don’t yet exist, then I shouldn’t claim that minicamp was a success. But again, I must repeat what KPier originally told you: My original blog post on minicamp being a success made it clear that such ‘success’ was assessed based on exit surveys and participant testimonials:
Our exit survey shows that the camp was a smashing success...
[Participants] continue to share the minicamp’s impact on themselves, and the impact they are having on others as a result, via an online mailing list and regular Skype video chats.
You seem to have interpreted ‘success’ in a different way than it was used in that blog post, perhaps to mean something like “Rationality minicamp successfully improved the rationality and life success of its participants, as demonstrated by several quantitative measures.”
But as the original blog post shows, that’s not what was meant to be claimed by calling the rationality minicamp a ‘success’.
Now, I’ll be happy to make this clearer by editing the original blog post, and by asking Eliezer to edit his post above. We could call it a ‘highly praised’ or ‘well-reviewed’ minicamp where brevity is needed, and where we have more space we could say something like “The minicamp was well-received by participants, who rated it highly in our anonymous exit survey and have given glowing reviews and reports of their resulting self-improvement. Further evidence concerning the minicamp’s effect on participants’ rationality and life success are pending.”
As for the fact that this data is still being gathered because it takes time for people’s lives to change and it takes time to parse collected data, you appear to have called this an “implausible excuse,” though I still don’t know what’s implausible about it.
Or perhaps what you meant to call an “implausible excuse” is my point about how the raw exit survey data is anonymous and private, and that’s why we can’t publish it. But I’m not sure what’s implausible about that, either. You can ask the minicamp participants themselves: We asked them to fill out one form that would be anonymous and private (the exit survey form), and another that would be identifiable and public (the testimonials form).
You also said I flip-flopped between these two “excuses”, but that’s not true. I maintain both claims. It takes time to collect and parse data on life changes and we can’t publish the private and anonymous exit form data.
Olympus mindset
You keep finding things that you choose to interpret as demonstrating my ‘Olympus mindset’ without addressing disconfirming evidence like what I gave above:
I feel I (justly) have no authority at all because (1) I learned about the intelligence explosion less than a year ago and discuss it every day with people who have thought for much longer about the subject, (2) I have completed no degrees and published no papers (yet) on the subject, and (3) I am surrounded by math and programming geniuses who inadvertently cause me to feel insecure about my relative lack of training in those fields.
Moreover, I try to speak less “from personal authority” than everyone else, via bothering to cite the scientific papers supporting many of the claims I make—and even if all I did was track down the right papers, read the abstracts, and cite them, this would still be more work than other LWers usually do to ground their claims in the scientific literature.
I’d also be curious to hear from others who think I display an ‘Olympus mindset’, and what triggers they think give them that impression. I don’t want to be giving off an inaccurate impression of myself in that way. I still practice facial expressions in the mirror because my face sometimes doesn’t clearly communicate my mindset, and obviously I still need to practice my online communication because my typed words don’t always clearly communicate my mindset, either.
EDIT: This has become an unproductive flame war, with no small thanks to my own behavior, and I will now bow out.
Now, I’ll be happy to make this clearer by editing the original blog post, and by asking Eliezer to edit his post above. We could call it a ‘highly praised’ or ‘well-reviewed’ minicamp where brevity is needed, and where we have more space we could say something like “The minicamp was well-received by participants, who rated it highly in our anonymous exit survey and have given glowing reviews and reports of their resulting self-improvement. Further evidence concerning the minicamp’s effect on participants’ rationality and life success are pending.”
As for the fact that this data is still being gathered because it takes time for people’s lives to change
I disagree with this. My intuition, supplemented by experience in somewhat analogous religious retreats, is that change happens easily in the camp environment and the question is how much of that will be inculcated enough to survive once the return to life happens.
I’d say it takes time to be sure people’s lives have changed permanently, but not too much time for them to change.
So if minicamp related posts had instead of ‘success’ said ‘we were very pleased with the execution of the camp and it gives us a promising direction to explore’ would you have felt similarly to how you feel now?
If so, why are you still arguing about whether SIAI has prematurely judged the minicamp instead of asking them to make their judgment less ambiguous?
They don’t seem to agree that they should have done anything differently, so I don’t know why I would be at the point of asking them to change something. But yes, I would appreciate characterizations of the mini-camp that aren’t extremely misleading, please pass it on through someone who they’ll listen to.
Yes, around the time I posted it. I don’t care if you find this implausible; I didn’t find your claims of never having seen my requests plausible either. I don’t have time to substantiate this claim either; I’m too busy.
People usually expect comments on topics they start; I don’t know why you would expect otherwise just because it’s “an announcement post”. It’s the Olympus mentality that says, “I talk, you listen, replies not wanted.” It’s the mentality that replies defensively to any cross-examination of evidence you’ve presented.
I didn’t assign those high priority for a reply because others already said what I would have said in reply, and it was becoming clear that I was not alone in being suspicious of this evidence.
I also didn’t ask to see testimonials because I didn’t consider those strong evidence for what you’re claiming—like others noted, they don’t really distinguish you from any other self-help camp.
And I explained that you don’t get to play “evidence takes time!” while saying, “yep, I already have enough evidence to call this a success and ignore any questioning of this claim”.
What was there to reply to? “Oh, well, since you personally feel you had a good time, I guess I shouldn’t be suspicious that it improved anyone’s rationality”?
I said I would pay the ransom you’re demanding for your evidence. That was the only reason I was willing to help you. I never withdrew any offer; rather, you tried to change the topic to helping with your research, which I don’t want to do, never did, and never offered to.
Those are regarding a different thread and different claim; there’s nothing to explain here, and I’d appreciate if you didn’t misreport evidence.
Sure thing—and you can keep it in mind too, when using increasingly strong superlatives to describe our success.
Despite multiple requests to drop this discussion, I’d like to put a little more effort toward mutual understanding. Perhaps I’m irrationally optimistic for reconciliation and convergence.
Others have addressed the unproductive ‘attack-mode’ nature of your comments; I won’t address that here. Suffice it to say that I have plenty to learn myself about communicating diplomatically.
I also won’t say much more on the issue of my not having seen your earlier calls for evidence of minicamp’s success. I can only repeat: If you want to be sure I’ll read a particular comment, make sure you contact me directly or reply to one of my comments so that your comment shows up in the LW inbox. I do not have time to keep revisiting old posts and reading all comments made on them, and I kinda doubt anyone thinks that is the best use of my limited time when I could instead be doing research and academic outreach related to rationality and FAI theory. You may insist on attributing this to my ‘Olympus Mentality’, though I’ll try to dissuade you of this interpretation below.
As for your definite accusation that I lied when I said I hadn’t seen your earlier comments on the topic, it remains the case that I never replied to them, and they seem like comments I would have replied to given my well-documented defensiveness on LW. Just notice how tenaciously I’ve defended myself in this discussion, despite a continuous slew of character attacks.
As for your accusation that I strawmanned you, I tried to explain that unless I had a policy of checking tons of old posts for new comments it’s not clear I would have seen your original comment, but you seem to simply disagree, so I don’t think there’s much more to say about that.
Finally, you seem to have suggested that I said I made announcement posts “we’re not supposed to discuss, or argue about, or criticize, or question, or whine about—like the mini-camp results topic”, but that’s just not true. You’re welcome to discuss, argue, criticize, question, or whine about anything I post on Less Wrong. All I said was that I don’t go back and check every post for new comments, and that if you want to make sure I read something you should contact me directly or be sure to reply directly to one of my comments so that I see it in my LW inbox.
A ‘Successful’ Minicamp
jsalvatier has repeatedly suggested that we may have different ideas of what I meant when I wrote that Rationality Minicamp was a success.
As KPier wrote in response to what seems to be your original comment on this topic, “The article pretty clearly states that the claims about the effects of the camp were based on exit surveys, and that the impact of the camp is demonstrated by the projects the camp grads are now working on. You could debate whether those are good measures, but we don’t exactly have better ones.” Later, Anna and myself gave that specific evidence in more detail.
You might be willing to concede that the evidence from exit surveys and testimonials provide about as much evidence of minicamp ‘success’ as such measures are capable of providing, though that may not be much. Is that true?
But of course, you’ve been asking for stronger evidence. You’d like to see measures of rationality improvement or life success or something like that. I addressed this exact request directly in my very first comment on the topic:
You replied that if these stronger forms of evidence don’t yet exist, then I shouldn’t claim that minicamp was a success. But again, I must repeat what KPier originally told you: My original blog post on minicamp being a success made it clear that such ‘success’ was assessed based on exit surveys and participant testimonials:
You seem to have interpreted ‘success’ in a different way than it was used in that blog post, perhaps to mean something like “Rationality minicamp successfully improved the rationality and life success of its participants, as demonstrated by several quantitative measures.”
But as the original blog post shows, that’s not what was meant to be claimed by calling the rationality minicamp a ‘success’.
Now, I’ll be happy to make this clearer by editing the original blog post, and by asking Eliezer to edit his post above. We could call it a ‘highly praised’ or ‘well-reviewed’ minicamp where brevity is needed, and where we have more space we could say something like “The minicamp was well-received by participants, who rated it highly in our anonymous exit survey and have given glowing reviews and reports of their resulting self-improvement. Further evidence concerning the minicamp’s effect on participants’ rationality and life success are pending.”
As for the fact that this data is still being gathered because it takes time for people’s lives to change and it takes time to parse collected data, you appear to have called this an “implausible excuse,” though I still don’t know what’s implausible about it.
Or perhaps what you meant to call an “implausible excuse” is my point about how the raw exit survey data is anonymous and private, and that’s why we can’t publish it. But I’m not sure what’s implausible about that, either. You can ask the minicamp participants themselves: We asked them to fill out one form that would be anonymous and private (the exit survey form), and another that would be identifiable and public (the testimonials form).
You also said I flip-flopped between these two “excuses”, but that’s not true. I maintain both claims. It takes time to collect and parse data on life changes and we can’t publish the private and anonymous exit form data.
Olympus mindset
You keep finding things that you choose to interpret as demonstrating my ‘Olympus mindset’ without addressing disconfirming evidence like what I gave above:
I’d also be curious to hear from others who think I display an ‘Olympus mindset’, and what triggers they think give them that impression. I don’t want to be giving off an inaccurate impression of myself in that way. I still practice facial expressions in the mirror because my face sometimes doesn’t clearly communicate my mindset, and obviously I still need to practice my online communication because my typed words don’t always clearly communicate my mindset, either.
EDIT: This has become an unproductive flame war, with no small thanks to my own behavior, and I will now bow out.
Support!
Okay, I’ve done both these things.
Thanks, I appreciate it.
I disagree with this. My intuition, supplemented by experience in somewhat analogous religious retreats, is that change happens easily in the camp environment and the question is how much of that will be inculcated enough to survive once the return to life happens.
I’d say it takes time to be sure people’s lives have changed permanently, but not too much time for them to change.
Luke wins the flame war! Huzzah!
Yes he did! The smarter and tougher man won.
So if minicamp related posts had instead of ‘success’ said ‘we were very pleased with the execution of the camp and it gives us a promising direction to explore’ would you have felt similarly to how you feel now?
If so, why are you still arguing about whether SIAI has prematurely judged the minicamp instead of asking them to make their judgment less ambiguous?
They don’t seem to agree that they should have done anything differently, so I don’t know why I would be at the point of asking them to change something. But yes, I would appreciate characterizations of the mini-camp that aren’t extremely misleading, please pass it on through someone who they’ll listen to.