Thank you for the feedback. Let me now try to reply to some of your points, in order to help you and anyone else reading better understand where I am coming from. (I don’t intend these replies as rejections of the information you’ve offered about your own perspective.)
Claiming to be wise enough that what you think should make other people significantly change their point of view is OBVIOUSLY arrogant. What is so hard to understand about that?
I was only claiming to be “wise enough” to have my point of view taken into account. Not all Bayesian updates are large updates! Now, of course, in this particular case, I did think a large update was warranted; but I didn’t expect that large update to be made on the basis of my authority, I expected it to be made on the basis of my arguments.
“I’ll let you in on a secret” makes you come off significantly worse
That seems bizarre, unless you interpreted it as sarcasm. But it wasn’t sarcasm: I spelled out in the next sentence that I was actually embarrassed to be making the admission!
Another strange thing about the reaction to this is that I didn’t actually claim my “single greatest skill” was actually all that great. I just said it was the greatest skill I had. It could perhaps be quite bad, with all the other skills simply being even worse. The only comparison was with my own other skills, not the skills of other people.
What I was saying was “if you ever listen to me on anything, listen to me on this!”.
And a flat statement saying you should update on my beliefs
This feels to me like I’m being interpreted uncharitably. My statement was highly specific and limited in scope. It was not in any sense a “flat” statement; it was fairly narrowly circumscribed.
“I’ll let you in on a secret” makes you come off significantly worse
That seems bizarre, unless you interpreted it as sarcasm.
A data point: doesn’t seem bizarre to me. Whether I interpret it as (a specific type of) sarcasm I’m not sure. Sarcasm needn’t hinge only on the contradiction between the literal and factual meaning of “secret”, but also on the contradiction between a relatively familiar / seemingly friendly phrase and the general expression of disagreement.
Data point: It didn’t come off that way to me either, I found it sounded condescending.
I agree that “at Singularity Institute” sounds weird, but I also know that judgement on what sounds weird or what connotations come up—including things like “I’ll let you in on a secret”—vary a lot from person to person, even among people from the same language and country and background.
Thank you for the feedback. Let me now try to reply to some of your points, in order to help you and anyone else reading better understand where I am coming from. (I don’t intend these replies as rejections of the information you’ve offered about your own perspective.)
I was only claiming to be “wise enough” to have my point of view taken into account. Not all Bayesian updates are large updates! Now, of course, in this particular case, I did think a large update was warranted; but I didn’t expect that large update to be made on the basis of my authority, I expected it to be made on the basis of my arguments.
That seems bizarre, unless you interpreted it as sarcasm. But it wasn’t sarcasm: I spelled out in the next sentence that I was actually embarrassed to be making the admission!
Another strange thing about the reaction to this is that I didn’t actually claim my “single greatest skill” was actually all that great. I just said it was the greatest skill I had. It could perhaps be quite bad, with all the other skills simply being even worse. The only comparison was with my own other skills, not the skills of other people.
What I was saying was “if you ever listen to me on anything, listen to me on this!”.
This feels to me like I’m being interpreted uncharitably. My statement was highly specific and limited in scope. It was not in any sense a “flat” statement; it was fairly narrowly circumscribed.
A data point: doesn’t seem bizarre to me. Whether I interpret it as (a specific type of) sarcasm I’m not sure. Sarcasm needn’t hinge only on the contradiction between the literal and factual meaning of “secret”, but also on the contradiction between a relatively familiar / seemingly friendly phrase and the general expression of disagreement.
The phrase was intended to be friendly, precisely in order to mitigate the general expression of disagreement!
Data point: It didn’t come off that way to me either, I found it sounded condescending.
I agree that “at Singularity Institute” sounds weird, but I also know that judgement on what sounds weird or what connotations come up—including things like “I’ll let you in on a secret”—vary a lot from person to person, even among people from the same language and country and background.