That Eliezer wrote the Sequences and appears to think according to their rules and is aware of Löb’s Theorem is strong evidence that he is good at error-checking himself.
That’s pretty much a circular argument. How’s the third-party verifiable evidence look?
Mostly not—but then I am a human full of cognitive biases. Has anyone else in the field paid them any attention? Do they have any third-party notice at all? We’re talking here about somewhere north of a million words of closely-reasoned philosophy with direct relevance to that field’s big questions, for example. It’s quite plausible that it could be good and have no notice, because there’s not that much attention to go around; but if you want me to assume it’s as good as it would be with decent third-party tyre-kicking, I think I can reasonably ask for more than “the guy that wrote it and the people working at the institute he founded agree, and hey, do they look good to you?” That’s really not much of an argument in favour.
Put it this way: I’d be foolish to accept cryptography with that little outside testing as good, here you’re talking about operating system software for the human mind. It needs more than “the guy who wrote it and the people who work for him think it’s good” for me to assume that.
That’s pretty much a circular argument. How’s the third-party verifiable evidence look?
I dunno. Do the Sequences smell like bullshit to you?
edit: this is needlessly antagonistic. Sorry.
Mostly not—but then I am a human full of cognitive biases. Has anyone else in the field paid them any attention? Do they have any third-party notice at all? We’re talking here about somewhere north of a million words of closely-reasoned philosophy with direct relevance to that field’s big questions, for example. It’s quite plausible that it could be good and have no notice, because there’s not that much attention to go around; but if you want me to assume it’s as good as it would be with decent third-party tyre-kicking, I think I can reasonably ask for more than “the guy that wrote it and the people working at the institute he founded agree, and hey, do they look good to you?” That’s really not much of an argument in favour.
Put it this way: I’d be foolish to accept cryptography with that little outside testing as good, here you’re talking about operating system software for the human mind. It needs more than “the guy who wrote it and the people who work for him think it’s good” for me to assume that.
Fair enough. It is slightly more than Vaniver has going in their favour, to return to my attempt to balance their rationality against each other.
Upvoted to zero because of the edit.