Frankly, there seem to be a lot of people in the LessWrong community who imagine themselves to be, not just more rational than average, but paragons of rationality who other people should accept as such. I’ve encountered people talking as if it’s ridiculous to suggest they might sometimes respond badly to being told the truth about certain subjects. I’ve encountered people asserting the rational superiority of themselves and others in the community for flimsy reasons, or no reason at all.
I agree with your assessment. My suspicion is that this is due to nth-degree imitations of certain high status people in the LW community who have been rather shameless about speaking in extremely confident tones about things that they are only 70% sure about. The strategy I have resorted to for people like this is asking them/checking if they have PredictionBook account and if not, assuming that they are overconfident just like is common with regular human beings. At some point I’d like to write an extended rebuttal to this post.
To provide counterpoint, however, there are certainly a lot of people who go around confidently saying things who are not as smart or rational as a 5th percentile LWer. So if the 5th percentile LWer is having an argument with one of these people, it’s arguably an epistemological win if they are displaying a higher level of confidence than the other person in order to convince bystanders. An LWer friend of mine who is in the habit of speaking very confidently about things made me realize that maybe it was a better idea for me to develop antibodies to smart people speaking really confidently and start speaking really confidently myself than it was for me to get him to stop speaking as confidently.
I agree with your assessment. My suspicion is that this is due to nth-degree imitations of certain high status people in the LW community who have been rather shameless about speaking in extremely confident tones about things that they are only 70% sure about. The strategy I have resorted to for people like this is asking them/checking if they have PredictionBook account and if not, assuming that they are overconfident just like is common with regular human beings. At some point I’d like to write an extended rebuttal to this post.
To provide counterpoint, however, there are certainly a lot of people who go around confidently saying things who are not as smart or rational as a 5th percentile LWer. So if the 5th percentile LWer is having an argument with one of these people, it’s arguably an epistemological win if they are displaying a higher level of confidence than the other person in order to convince bystanders. An LWer friend of mine who is in the habit of speaking very confidently about things made me realize that maybe it was a better idea for me to develop antibodies to smart people speaking really confidently and start speaking really confidently myself than it was for me to get him to stop speaking as confidently.