I would not expect EY to have predicted that himself, given his background. If, however, he either had studied PR deeply or had consulted with a domain expert before posting, then I would have totally expected that result to be predicted with some significant likelihood. Remember, optimally good rationalists should win, and be able to anticipate social dynamics. In this case EY fell into a social trap he didn’t even know existed, so again, I do not blame him personally, but that does not negate the fact that he’s historically not been very good at anticipating that sort of thing, due to lack of training/experience/intuition in that field.
I’m fairly confident that at least regarding the Roko’s Basilisk disaster, I would have been able to predict something close to what actually happened if I had seen his comment before he posted it. (This would have been primarily due to pattern matching between the post and known instances of the Striezand Effect, as well as some amount of hard-to-formally-explain intuition that EY’s wording would invoke strong negative emotions in some groups, even if he hadn’t taken any action. Studying “ratio’d” tweets can help give you a sense for this, if you want to practice that admittedly very niche skill). I’m not saying this to imply that I’m a better rationalist than EY (I’m not), merely to say that EY—and the rationalist movement generally—hasn’t focused on honing the skillset necessary to excel at PR, which has sometimes been to our collective detriment.
I would not expect EY to have predicted that himself, given his background. If, however, he either had studied PR deeply or had consulted with a domain expert before posting, then I would have totally expected that result to be predicted with some significant likelihood. Remember, optimally good rationalists should win, and be able to anticipate social dynamics. In this case EY fell into a social trap he didn’t even know existed, so again, I do not blame him personally, but that does not negate the fact that he’s historically not been very good at anticipating that sort of thing, due to lack of training/experience/intuition in that field. I’m fairly confident that at least regarding the Roko’s Basilisk disaster, I would have been able to predict something close to what actually happened if I had seen his comment before he posted it. (This would have been primarily due to pattern matching between the post and known instances of the Striezand Effect, as well as some amount of hard-to-formally-explain intuition that EY’s wording would invoke strong negative emotions in some groups, even if he hadn’t taken any action. Studying “ratio’d” tweets can help give you a sense for this, if you want to practice that admittedly very niche skill). I’m not saying this to imply that I’m a better rationalist than EY (I’m not), merely to say that EY—and the rationalist movement generally—hasn’t focused on honing the skillset necessary to excel at PR, which has sometimes been to our collective detriment.