I will come as a surprise to few people that I disagree strongly with Eliezer here; Wei should not take his word for the claim that Wei is so much more rational than all the folks he might disagree with that he can ignore their differing opinions. Where is this robust rationality test used to compare Wei to the rest of the intellectual world? Where is the evidence for this supposed mental health risk of considering the important evidence of the opinions of other? If the world is crazy, then very likely so are you. Yes it is a good sign if you can show some of your work, but you can almost never show all of your relevant work. So we must make inferences about the thought we have not seen.
Well, I think we both agree on the dangers of a wide variety of cheap talk—or to put it more humbly, you taught me on the subject. Though even before then, I had developed the unfortunate personal habit of calling people’s bluffs.
So while we can certainly interpret talk about modesty and immodesty in terms of rhetoric, isn’t the main testable prediction at stake, the degree to which Wei Dai should often find, on further investigation, that people who disagree with him turn out to have surprisingly good reasons to do so?
Do you think—to jump all the way back to the original question—that if Dai went around asking people “Why aren’t you working on decision theory and anthropics because you can’t stand not knowing the answers?” that they would have some brilliantly decisive comeback that Dai never thought of which makes Dai realize that he shouldn’t be spending time on the topic either? What odds would you bet at?
Brilliant decisive reasons are rare for most topics, and most people can’t articulate very many of their reasons for most of their choices. Their most common reason would probably be that they found other topics more interesting, and to evaluate that reason Wei would have to understand the reasons for thinking all those other topics interesting. Saying “if you can’t prove to me why I’m wrong in ten minutes I must be right” is not a very reliable path to truth.
I will come as a surprise to few people that I disagree strongly with Eliezer here; Wei should not take his word for the claim that Wei is so much more rational than all the folks he might disagree with that he can ignore their differing opinions. Where is this robust rationality test used to compare Wei to the rest of the intellectual world? Where is the evidence for this supposed mental health risk of considering the important evidence of the opinions of other? If the world is crazy, then very likely so are you. Yes it is a good sign if you can show some of your work, but you can almost never show all of your relevant work. So we must make inferences about the thought we have not seen.
Well, I think we both agree on the dangers of a wide variety of cheap talk—or to put it more humbly, you taught me on the subject. Though even before then, I had developed the unfortunate personal habit of calling people’s bluffs.
So while we can certainly interpret talk about modesty and immodesty in terms of rhetoric, isn’t the main testable prediction at stake, the degree to which Wei Dai should often find, on further investigation, that people who disagree with him turn out to have surprisingly good reasons to do so?
Do you think—to jump all the way back to the original question—that if Dai went around asking people “Why aren’t you working on decision theory and anthropics because you can’t stand not knowing the answers?” that they would have some brilliantly decisive comeback that Dai never thought of which makes Dai realize that he shouldn’t be spending time on the topic either? What odds would you bet at?
Brilliant decisive reasons are rare for most topics, and most people can’t articulate very many of their reasons for most of their choices. Their most common reason would probably be that they found other topics more interesting, and to evaluate that reason Wei would have to understand the reasons for thinking all those other topics interesting. Saying “if you can’t prove to me why I’m wrong in ten minutes I must be right” is not a very reliable path to truth.
I’d expect a lot of people to answer “Nobody is paying me to work on it.”