If I put on my cynical hat, it looks like there’s going to be lots of (regressional) goodharting on persuasiveness here. If you look at those who are the *most* believed when they say things on important matters, or the people whose ideas *most* dominate the conversation, its probably significantly because they maxed out other variables that go into ‘speaking/writing well’ which aren’t just ‘good communication of true and useful things’.
To point to a concrete example of the former, it seems like Peter Singer makes a number of plain factual errors in his writings that reverse the conclusions of his arguments (1, 2). A friend recently suggested to me that Singer likes to take on the frame of ‘reasonable person against the incoherent, screaming masses’, regardless of the truth of his arguments. I’m not confident in that read of him, but it doesn’t seem obviously implausible to me as a tactic a person of the first type would use in current society.
(Homework is to apply such analysis to other public intellectuals like Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, etc.)
To point to concrete examples of the latter… well, the space of ‘things that successfully grab our attention’ feels super vague to me right now, so instead let me point to examples of fairly good things that nonetheless have had to compete very strongly in that domain. LastWeekTonight feels like the obvious one (while I don’t trust it a great deal, it is better than much of its natural competition in that it learns toward discussing apartisan matters, and often in lots of detail). What’s more, WaitButWhy has found that order to get people to take seriously the destruction of all value forever, you have to be funny and do cutesy drawings, and it seems like Eliezer and Scott have had to be incredibly fun writers in order to be read quite so much.
(And yup, because of regressional goodharting and conservation of expected evidence, this is also Bayesian evidence that their ideas are not as true/novel as you previously thought.)
...I notice my comment doesn’t obviously read as a reply to yours. It was inspired by asking the cynical question “What if there’s an arms race / race to the bottom in persuasiveness, and you have to pick up all the symmetrical weapons others use and then use asymmetrical weapons on top of those?”
Added: Unrelated questions: Why do LastWeekTonight, WaitButWhy, and SlateStarCodex all have three words in their titles? What’s more, why do Steven Pinker, Peter Singer, Sam Harris, and Jordan Peterson all have an ‘S’ or a ‘P’ in their initials?!
“What if there’s an arms race / race to the bottom in persuasiveness, and you have to pick up all the symmetrical weapons others use and then use asymmetrical weapons on top of those?”
Doesn’t this question apply to other cases of symmetric/asymmetric weapons just as much?
I think the argument is that you want to try and avoid the arms race by getting everyone to agree to stick to symmetrical weapons because they believe it’ll benefit them (because they’re right). This may not work if they don’t actually believe they’re right and are just using persuasion as a tool, but I think it’s something we could establish as a community norm in restricted circles at least.
If I put on my cynical hat, it looks like there’s going to be lots of (regressional) goodharting on persuasiveness here. If you look at those who are the *most* believed when they say things on important matters, or the people whose ideas *most* dominate the conversation, its probably significantly because they maxed out other variables that go into ‘speaking/writing well’ which aren’t just ‘good communication of true and useful things’.
To point to a concrete example of the former, it seems like Peter Singer makes a number of plain factual errors in his writings that reverse the conclusions of his arguments (1, 2). A friend recently suggested to me that Singer likes to take on the frame of ‘reasonable person against the incoherent, screaming masses’, regardless of the truth of his arguments. I’m not confident in that read of him, but it doesn’t seem obviously implausible to me as a tactic a person of the first type would use in current society.
(Homework is to apply such analysis to other public intellectuals like Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, etc.)
To point to concrete examples of the latter… well, the space of ‘things that successfully grab our attention’ feels super vague to me right now, so instead let me point to examples of fairly good things that nonetheless have had to compete very strongly in that domain. LastWeekTonight feels like the obvious one (while I don’t trust it a great deal, it is better than much of its natural competition in that it learns toward discussing apartisan matters, and often in lots of detail). What’s more, WaitButWhy has found that order to get people to take seriously the destruction of all value forever, you have to be funny and do cutesy drawings, and it seems like Eliezer and Scott have had to be incredibly fun writers in order to be read quite so much.
(And yup, because of regressional goodharting and conservation of expected evidence, this is also Bayesian evidence that their ideas are not as true/novel as you previously thought.)
...I notice my comment doesn’t obviously read as a reply to yours. It was inspired by asking the cynical question “What if there’s an arms race / race to the bottom in persuasiveness, and you have to pick up all the symmetrical weapons others use and then use asymmetrical weapons on top of those?”
Added: Unrelated questions: Why do LastWeekTonight, WaitButWhy, and SlateStarCodex all have three words in their titles? What’s more, why do Steven Pinker, Peter Singer, Sam Harris, and Jordan Peterson all have an ‘S’ or a ‘P’ in their initials?!
Now I’m imagining the unparalleled amount of readers I will get once I start my new blog, SuperPersuasiveSoliloquies.
I realise we should have called our project, not LessWrong 2, but MoreLessWrong.
LessWrongExtra
MoreOrLessWrong
ProbablyLessWrong
StatisticallyLessWrong
MakeLessWrongAgain
ExtraLessWrong
SuperLessWrong
Doesn’t this question apply to other cases of symmetric/asymmetric weapons just as much?
I think the argument is that you want to try and avoid the arms race by getting everyone to agree to stick to symmetrical weapons because they believe it’ll benefit them (because they’re right). This may not work if they don’t actually believe they’re right and are just using persuasion as a tool, but I think it’s something we could establish as a community norm in restricted circles at least.