Rereading some of those old posts it’s fascinating to see how much Eliezer’s writing has sharpened from then to now!
talisman
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fixed
I can’t get the html links to work; can someone help?
Playing Video Games In Shuffle Mode
To be clear, my comment above isn’t meant to be a “charge”! Among other things, Eliezer is exceptionally gifted at making ideas interesting and accessible in a way that Robin isn’t at all. I’m looking forward to his book coming out and changing the world.
I personally love his stuff, and think it’s great 1) for people that are completely new to these ideas; 2) for people that are fairly advanced and have the ideas deep in their bones.
For people in between, I sometimes feel like his writing presents too much of a glide path—answers too many questions for the student, guides the reader too unerringly to the answers, presents a polished surface that makes it hard for inexperienced learners to understand the components of the thought process and learn to do the same themselves.
It’s much more than peer pressure. Eliezer, along with the other authors, use a confident, rhythmic, almost biblical style, which is very entertaining and compelling. You don’t just learn deep things with EY, you feel like you’re learning deep things. Robin Hanson’s thought is incredibly deep, but his style is much more open, and I would guess you find his writings not to have this property.
Robin and Eliezer have debated writing style over at OB, and I highly recommend you read that debate, Patrick.
You should also, in my opinion, be very cautious about this feeling; there’s a reason that religious writings have this style, and I would bet you would be less able to find logical gaps in something written in this style. I had a similar set of experiences as an adolescent Randian.
Occasionally, well-respected community members could say things that are intentionally false, but persuasive and subtle, a la http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/02/my-favorite-lia.html.
You get points for catching these mistakes. Perhaps you submit your busts privately to some arbiter so others have the same challenge.
Later, the error is revealed and discussed.
This would also have the benefit of causing everyone to read the most-respected members’ writings ultra-critically, rather than sitting back and being spoon-fed.
One key thing this idea has is short term feedback. Frequent, rapid feedback is essential for getting good at this kind of thing. (IMO that’s why economics is still so useless relative to the other sciences: the experiments take fifty years to run.)
The phraseology “raise them X” suggests to me inculcating deep, emotional, childhood-locked belief in X. The only X for which that seems supportable is rationality itself.
Raise them many-worlds.
I do a lot of interviewing candidates for jobs, and it’s essential to be aware of both those concepts. In working on our hiring process, we discuss both concepts, in words very similar to yours.
I’ve heard occasional complaints about certain things we do in our interviews, of the form “what does X have to do with being a good Y?!”. These complaints invariably come from people who didn’t get offers, and give me a warm glow at having made the correct decision.
No idea the extent to which EY’s approval upped this, but what I can say is that I was less than half through the post before I jumped to the bottom, voted Up, and looked for any other way to indicate approval.
It’s immediately surprising, interesting, obvious-in-retrospect-only, and most importantly, relevant to everyday life. Superb.
That link doesn’t work due to the angle brackets.