I do have the impression that the Vassarites are underestimating how expensive information is, and overestimating how much is known.
I think this makes them mistaken about some things both on the object level (plausibly like in your case) and on the meta-level, and that it is an obstacle for some of their communication.
Maybe if I got involved with them, I could better convince them of the cost of information.
However I think they also have very different standards for what is acceptable performance, which seem in principle achievable if one had improvements in some of the areas Vassarites point as, but which is rarely achieved otherwise.
Update: In a twitter chatroom, I was trying to ask the Vassarites the complaints they have about rationalism and EA, so I could write it up in a list and interrogate rationalists/EAs about it, etc..
We got halfway done with making the list, and then Michael Vassar got frustrated and decided to leave, with the reasoning that giving me the complaints they have requires too much effort/attention, and I should already have information sufficient to notice that “EA is in general fraudulent if taken literally and is an attempt by non-literal language to prevent literal language if taken non-literally”.
… I am not active in EA, so I am not sure where I would get the information from, to be honest.
Edit: Update 2: He might have changed his mind. We will see.
I do have the impression that the Vassarites are underestimating how expensive information is, and overestimating how much is known.
I think this makes them mistaken about some things both on the object level (plausibly like in your case) and on the meta-level, and that it is an obstacle for some of their communication.
Maybe if I got involved with them, I could better convince them of the cost of information.
However I think they also have very different standards for what is acceptable performance, which seem in principle achievable if one had improvements in some of the areas Vassarites point as, but which is rarely achieved otherwise.
Update: In a twitter chatroom, I was trying to ask the Vassarites the complaints they have about rationalism and EA, so I could write it up in a list and interrogate rationalists/EAs about it, etc..
We got halfway done with making the list, and then Michael Vassar got frustrated and decided to leave, with the reasoning that giving me the complaints they have requires too much effort/attention, and I should already have information sufficient to notice that “EA is in general fraudulent if taken literally and is an attempt by non-literal language to prevent literal language if taken non-literally”.
… I am not active in EA, so I am not sure where I would get the information from, to be honest.
Edit: Update 2: He might have changed his mind. We will see.
Ok NOW he left.