I think Ilya is not claiming that no such group exists but that it is well nigh impossible to know that your group is one such. At least where the claim is being made very broadly, as it seems to be upthread. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for experimental physicists to think that their consensus on questions of experimental physics is strongly correlated with truth, for instance, and I bet Ilya doesn’t either.
More specifically, I think the following claim is quite plausible: When a group of people coalesces around some set of controversial ideas (be they political, religious, technological, or whatever), the correlation between group consensus and truth in the area of those controversial ideas may be positive or negative or zero, and members of the group are typically ill-equipped to tell which of these cases they’re in.
LW has the best epistemic hygiene of all the communities I’ve encountered and/or participated in.
In so far as epistemic hygiene is positively correlated with truth, I expect LW consensus to be more positively correlated with truth than most (not all) other internet communities.
I think Ilya is not claiming that no such group exists but that it is well nigh impossible to know that your group is one such. At least where the claim is being made very broadly, as it seems to be upthread. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for experimental physicists to think that their consensus on questions of experimental physics is strongly correlated with truth, for instance, and I bet Ilya doesn’t either.
More specifically, I think the following claim is quite plausible: When a group of people coalesces around some set of controversial ideas (be they political, religious, technological, or whatever), the correlation between group consensus and truth in the area of those controversial ideas may be positive or negative or zero, and members of the group are typically ill-equipped to tell which of these cases they’re in.
LW has the best epistemic hygiene of all the communities I’ve encountered and/or participated in.
In so far as epistemic hygiene is positively correlated with truth, I expect LW consensus to be more positively correlated with truth than most (not all) other internet communities.
Doesn’t LW loudly claim to be special in this respect?
And if it actually is not, doesn’t this represent a massive failure of the entire project?