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There is a particular flavor of writing common to those whose identity is bound up with the so-called “effective altruist” community and their various online fo
by throwaway9274 3y ago
There is a particular flavor of writing common to those whose identity is bound up with the so-called “effective altruist” community and their various online forums.
It usually combines a reference to Bayes Theorem, a deep hubris, and a significantly misunderstood concept from mathematics or technology.
Here, for example, it is clear the author does not grok EMH which applies across the population of trades not traders.
Usually this is done to provide the author or community with some claim to an inherent and unearned extraordinary nature, which justifies greater personal power. (You only need 200:1 evidence you’re extraordinary being the takeaway here.)
It is unclear why certain SV cliques continue to grant these people power.
Their intellectual insularity means
that whatever value they once added in bringing logical rigor to conversations is now far outweighed by the train of collective bad logic powering their groupthink.
It is increasingly dangerous to have such people steer important societal debates.
These debates include crypto regulation where EAs famously associated with SBF, to “AI safety”, a field that appears to be invented out of whole cloth to allow LessWrongers to LARP as ML ethics and fairness experts.
- lusus_naturae 3y agoPart of the problem is how easy it is to logically and rationally convince yourself or others of something inaccurate, imprecise or just plain wrong.
- kelseyfrog 3y agoThere's a small, but important ego boost that comes along with thinking one has access to a clearer[1] view of reality. The LessWrong community gets this by way of "Bayesian thinking" and trying to subvert their own expectations. For the general population though, you have the Freakanomics effect. 1. The intellectual mind's biggest motivator is certainty. This isn't necessarily a bad thing when certainty aligns with objective reality whatever that means, but then these folks get quite certain about how uncertain they are.
- d0mine 3y agoYour comment had more weight if you'd dropped the ad-hominem and kept just the specific critique about EMH.
- throwaway9274 3y agoI respectfully disagree. The portion regarding the norms in EA communities argumentation habits is the most weighty part of the analysis. The EMH example is a supporting detail. The thesis is this: EA communities are prone to insularity, hubris, and fabulism covered with a paper thin veneer of logic. The insularity generally means their arguments have not been subjected to even trivial scrutiny from non-EA communities. As a result, their arguments should as a first approximation be given no more weight than the average Reddit thread. To be logically complete it would need to collect a variety of examples of hubris, fabulism, and insularity from EA arguments, which is left as an exercise to the reader. Rhetorical fallacies are important to understand if you’re going to call them out. “Ad hominem” means attacking the argument by attacking the person. Here I am attacking the general credibility of a community of people based on the example of one of their members’ arguments. This is common in communities that are devoted to radical honesty and radical transparency, particularly those that actually have to hold these norms in high stakes market scenarios. It is called “believability weighting.” For example, if the Norway Government Pension Fund historically provides poor logical arguments in their analysis of EU recessions, their arguments about EU recessions should be given less weight in the future. Believability weighting is not the same as ad hominem.
- d0mine 3y agoIt looks gpt-generated. If you have good arguments to attack specific statements, methods, no need to attack people. Otherwise, it reminds me how tabacco / oil industry tries to discredit science (often successfully) by attacking individual scientists. I see the effort to discredit EA lately (and given that I read about EA almost exclusively on HN, It says something). I wonder why.
- throwaway9274 3y ago
- jstanley 3y agoThinking you're better than others because you're into LessWrong is no worse than thinking you're better than others because you're not into LessWrong!
- MichaelZuo 3y agoLW is surprisingly decent at identifying errors, and calling out obvious flights of fancy, probably even better then the HN average of 2023. Though the popular HN discussions in any given week usually cover a much wider spectrum. I would say at least 1 in 5 posts that get more then 100 karma are solid enough to stand up to ~1 hour of careful scrutiny, even by a reasonably well informed amateur. It's the EA forum where things are a bit looser.
- throwaway9274 3y agoWe are the product of the cultures with which we choose to engage. Some communities have positive signal. Others have negative signal.