First of all, I think anecdotal evidence from personal experience with people IRL is always extraordinarily compelling. When, for instance, I go onsite with a client, or when I go to a workshop and do research with people, I feel that I’ve been vastly more productive per hour than I am when I’m on my own. The standard startup advice is always “talk to customers/users.” Talking face to face with the people who do a thing has outsized power in teaching you about the thing.
On the other hand, some of this impression can be illusion. Social reality is strong. Being around people IRL might make you feel like you’re learning a lot very fast, but it might just be fairy glamor. Eyewitness accounts are famously unreliable testimony in court.
Basically, how much is it right to update on “I met some people who actually worked on national security, and I tried doing national-security stuff with them, and believe me, it is very serious and very hard and Trump would fuck it up”? How valuable is Eliezer’s eyewitness testimony?
I think eyewitness testimony is probably one of the important correctives to news and polls and opinion pieces—data is better than analysis on the margin, especially if you have reason not to trust the analysis, and the analysis is based on limited data. That’s one of my major updates. For all the flaws of eyewitness testimony, I think we need more of it, given the failures of other kinds of data in predicting the election result.
“I saw this thing. I tried to do this thing. It is very hard. You do not want to elect someone who can’t do the thing.” is a meaningful piece of evidence. If handling foreign policy is a “thinky” kind of activity that takes lots of care and self-restraint, and it seems like Eliezer’s experience is enough to confirm that it is, then we do have evidence from Trump’s lifelong career that he will be bad at that, given that he has a very short attention span and poor impulse control. It’s still possible that he will butt out of anything too technical and leave it to experts.
“Wars are caused by lack of clarity on which boundaries will be defended” sounds intuitively right, but I know little enough about military history to have really any opinion on that. If the President has a habit of shooting his mouth off, will that cause wars, or will people just stop believing the President? I’m genuinely uncertain.
Is Eliezer fucking up in a big way by being this anti-Trump? I put a little credence in “Trump is not unusually dangerous and a reasonable person should never have thought he was”, but he is definitely weird and different and this is not a normal election. I don’t buy “the world is in a business-as-usual state with no big trends” as a model to begin with. There are trends, there is “history”, large changes do happen. So, no, I don’t think Eliezer is fucking up in that sense.
Was it a mistake for him to have a loose, casual FB page with sloppier thinking than his more formal writing? Well, everyone on the internet has moved from more formal to sloppier forms of communication, and I think that is a bad move, and we should all be quite worried about that.
This reminds me of Paul Graham’s essay about weird programming languages. Languages designed for people less smart than you seem dumb and powerless. Those designed for people smarter than you seem weird.
If someone seems weird I take that as a sign they may be playing a higher level game. (They may just be weird of course).
A lot of people think Trump is stupid and has low impulse control. Consider though that his uncle was a professor of physics and his sister was a judge. His father was too poor to go to college but showed every indication of being a very capable person. It seems unlikely he is over-endowed with low IQ genes.
How many people have strong opinions about Trump without much data to base that on? How many have read his books?
Read his account of how he worked his way around the bullyish teacher Theodore Dobias—a strategy that, if you believe it, required a lot of restraint and finesse.
That’s like saying that if you believe Trump when he says that he’s the person who respects woman the most, there’s no reason to think he’s a misogynist.
There’s no reason to believe Trump when he tells tales about how great he is.
Also the quality of the writing is only one thing you get from the books.
I didn’t even speak about the quality about the writing. A bigger problem than writing quality seems that you simply take the stories that Trump wants to have told about himself at face value.
The latest one does not seem to have been ghost written.
Could you make the case for why you believe it wasn’t?
If someone seems weird I take that as a sign they may be playing a higher level game.
Just a reminder that “higher level”, despite being a local applause light, doesn’t necessarily imply “good”.
For example, having BLM people interrupt Sanders’ meetings was a higher level game by Clinton. Doesn’t mean it was good for the voters, and it even failed to be good for her own victory (although the last part may not apply to some parallel Everett branches, maybe even the majority of them).
Similarly, Trump may also be playing a higher level game which will backfire; except that it will happen after the election. (The hypothetised WW3 scenario would be a most dramatic example; it will probably be something less dramatic.)
Going back meta: playing the game on a higher level doesn’t imply you are not making mistakes, such as getting short-term gains along with greater long-term losses; it just means that you are doing it on a different level.
First of all, I think anecdotal evidence from personal experience with people IRL is always extraordinarily compelling. When, for instance, I go onsite with a client, or when I go to a workshop and do research with people, I feel that I’ve been vastly more productive per hour than I am when I’m on my own. The standard startup advice is always “talk to customers/users.” Talking face to face with the people who do a thing has outsized power in teaching you about the thing.
On the other hand, some of this impression can be illusion. Social reality is strong. Being around people IRL might make you feel like you’re learning a lot very fast, but it might just be fairy glamor. Eyewitness accounts are famously unreliable testimony in court.
Basically, how much is it right to update on “I met some people who actually worked on national security, and I tried doing national-security stuff with them, and believe me, it is very serious and very hard and Trump would fuck it up”? How valuable is Eliezer’s eyewitness testimony?
I think eyewitness testimony is probably one of the important correctives to news and polls and opinion pieces—data is better than analysis on the margin, especially if you have reason not to trust the analysis, and the analysis is based on limited data. That’s one of my major updates. For all the flaws of eyewitness testimony, I think we need more of it, given the failures of other kinds of data in predicting the election result.
“I saw this thing. I tried to do this thing. It is very hard. You do not want to elect someone who can’t do the thing.” is a meaningful piece of evidence. If handling foreign policy is a “thinky” kind of activity that takes lots of care and self-restraint, and it seems like Eliezer’s experience is enough to confirm that it is, then we do have evidence from Trump’s lifelong career that he will be bad at that, given that he has a very short attention span and poor impulse control. It’s still possible that he will butt out of anything too technical and leave it to experts.
“Wars are caused by lack of clarity on which boundaries will be defended” sounds intuitively right, but I know little enough about military history to have really any opinion on that. If the President has a habit of shooting his mouth off, will that cause wars, or will people just stop believing the President? I’m genuinely uncertain.
Is Eliezer fucking up in a big way by being this anti-Trump? I put a little credence in “Trump is not unusually dangerous and a reasonable person should never have thought he was”, but he is definitely weird and different and this is not a normal election. I don’t buy “the world is in a business-as-usual state with no big trends” as a model to begin with. There are trends, there is “history”, large changes do happen. So, no, I don’t think Eliezer is fucking up in that sense.
Was it a mistake for him to have a loose, casual FB page with sloppier thinking than his more formal writing? Well, everyone on the internet has moved from more formal to sloppier forms of communication, and I think that is a bad move, and we should all be quite worried about that.
This reminds me of Paul Graham’s essay about weird programming languages. Languages designed for people less smart than you seem dumb and powerless. Those designed for people smarter than you seem weird.
If someone seems weird I take that as a sign they may be playing a higher level game. (They may just be weird of course).
A lot of people think Trump is stupid and has low impulse control. Consider though that his uncle was a professor of physics and his sister was a judge. His father was too poor to go to college but showed every indication of being a very capable person. It seems unlikely he is over-endowed with low IQ genes.
How many people have strong opinions about Trump without much data to base that on? How many have read his books?
Read his account of how he worked his way around the bullyish teacher Theodore Dobias—a strategy that, if you believe it, required a lot of restraint and finesse.
Ghostwritten books tell you little about the intelligence of a person. They just tell you that he’s rich enough to afford a capable ghostwriter.
The Ghostwriter of the Art of the Deal wrote an article about what he learned writing the book for Trump: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all
That’s like saying that if you believe Trump when he says that he’s the person who respects woman the most, there’s no reason to think he’s a misogynist.
There’s no reason to believe Trump when he tells tales about how great he is.
The latest one does not seem to have been ghost written.
Also the quality of the writing is only one thing you get from the books.
I notice that no-one seems to be claiming they have actually read his books.
I didn’t even speak about the quality about the writing. A bigger problem than writing quality seems that you simply take the stories that Trump wants to have told about himself at face value.
Could you make the case for why you believe it wasn’t?
Just a reminder that “higher level”, despite being a local applause light, doesn’t necessarily imply “good”.
For example, having BLM people interrupt Sanders’ meetings was a higher level game by Clinton. Doesn’t mean it was good for the voters, and it even failed to be good for her own victory (although the last part may not apply to some parallel Everett branches, maybe even the majority of them).
Similarly, Trump may also be playing a higher level game which will backfire; except that it will happen after the election. (The hypothetised WW3 scenario would be a most dramatic example; it will probably be something less dramatic.)
Going back meta: playing the game on a higher level doesn’t imply you are not making mistakes, such as getting short-term gains along with greater long-term losses; it just means that you are doing it on a different level.
Indeed. But that was not my point. I was arguing that Trump does not seem to be stupid.