I think a common culprit is people misunderstanding Gödel’s theorems as blocking more things than they actually do. There’s also field-specific folklore — e.g., a lot of traditional academic decision theorists seem to have somehow acquired the belief that you can’t assign probabilities to your own actions, on pain of paradox.
Logical induction, Löbian cooperation, reflection in HOL, and functional decision theory are all results where researchers have expressed surprise to MIRI that the results were achievable even in principle.
I think a common culprit is people misunderstanding Gödel’s theorems as blocking more things than they actually do. There’s also field-specific folklore — e.g., a lot of traditional academic decision theorists seem to have somehow acquired the belief that you can’t assign probabilities to your own actions, on pain of paradox.
How many of those results are accepted as interesting and insighful outside MIRI?