And Yudkowsky criticized Rand for avoiding criticism/questioning…
Ever after, Rand’s grip over her remaining coterie was absolute, and no questioning was allowed.
Yeah that’s common. That’s part of the difficulty with spreading Paths Forward and other rationality ideas. Lots of people promote this stuff then don’t do it personally. There’s a lot of valid distrust from the general public towards people who claim they are actually reasonable and rational unlike the other intellectuals, and who criticize the other intellectuals for not being rational enough.
You have more evidence though. You actually have really long public debates. Do you know of public intellectuals who have had as persistent debates as you have?.
I think what sets you apart the most is your actions, but I think you having come up with Paths Forward is more convincing than the typical anti-bias and rationality lip-service essay. At least that’s what I thought when I read about PF, hence me comparing you to Socrates.
People have had very long low quality “debates” on the internet.
People generally don’t know how to evaluate debate quality, similar to how they generally don’t know how to evaluate essay quality.
I’ve gotten what I think are some very clear debate outcomes but lots of people flat out lie (including misquotes, wildly inaccurate paraphrases, and falsely putting words in other people’s mouths) so someone would have to read through a large amount of debate to check what really happened, which is a lot of work even if they had the skill and confidence to do that well.
There’s a widespread fear that greater persistence in debates is bad – it’s a way to troll people and always get the last word just by being more of a loser with nothing better to do than the other guy.
People were not impressed when I went on Less Wrong and debated many people at once, wrote a lot, etc. They were not like “wow we almost never get challenged by anyone willing to write this much”. They were more like “we downvoted everything you wrote and since you wrote so much you’re now the most downvoted person in our website’s history, so you must be really really extra dumb lol”.
I think if I say that to people myself it won’t work. But you can try! This seems like something where self-promotion is disadvantaged.
They don’t think “Wow! This guy has great independence and integrity! He won’t back down no matter how unpopular he gets. He’s really dedicated to the truth and is really energetic about it”. 
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I like the time when you were told as an insult you’re the type of person to not change your opinion even if the whole rest of the world disagreed. I think that’s objectively a compliment. Does someone know the link to that? It’s on curi.us IIRC.
To help you search, I think that was Shadow Starshine
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If someone debates, then can be accused of using rhetoric tricks or other irrational tactics. Even without specifying any, some people will accept it. If you write out arguments (about alleged rhetoric tricks) and use inaccurate paraphrases or quote stuff out of context or whatever, you can fool more people to the point that an actual rational debate might be needed to sort out the mess well.
Have you been accused of using rhetoric often?
Explicitly, not very often. But it’s such a common accusation/viewpoint against so many people that I’d imagine some people have thought it without saying it.
And I think David Deutsch has spread the idea to a bunch of his fans. In one of his last emails to me, in 2011, he gave some explanation about why he thinks he started liking me less. My bold:
The other issues have stalled for a less benign reason. It is that you have developed a repertoire of argumentative tactics which, when applied (you do not always apply them), effectively prevent you from being persuaded of anything. With each particular item on which this has happened (including deduction, Mises, gold standard), I have stopped when I have run out of ideas for how to present the relevant idea to you in a way that gets round the tactics. Just tactics. Nothing to do with content, and I say this independently of whether I’m right or wrong on the issues. These are all issues on which neither of us has any axe to grind anyway.
I consider this paragraph dangerous because it uses rhetoric tactics against me and it has Deutsch’s social status behind it. I already shared it though.
One important thing going on here is that Deutsch is basically admitting that he tries to persuade me, and when that isn’t working, he stops talking about that topic until he has a new plan for how to persuade me. Something missing from his framing is a way for him to be persuaded.
Perhaps even more important is that Deutsch did not point out the tactics as they happened or quote and analyze a bunch of examples. So he’s just saying this without evidence and without any realistic way for me to fix it (if he were right). And he wasn’t willing to discuss this much and respond to counter-arguments.
Found it :)
I got flamed on Discord by Shadow Starshine because he thinks I’m not second-handed, which he thinks is bad:
Curi strikes me as someone who everyone in the world could disagree with and he’d still think he was right
Yeah I judge by arguments about the issues, not by other people’s opinions and how popular and high social status those opinions are.
I think you said another place you that you took it as a compliment.
A post was merged into an existing topic: Polymathic Infinities
Who has more public intellectual writing?
- Me.
- Every person affiliated with the Conjecture Institute, combined.
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The Conjecture Institute has 22 people, 3 women and 19 men.
100% of the women have credentials and, by my count, 47% of the men do. I have no issue with including uncredentialed people in general, but if women have to have credentials to be included, while men don’t, that seems bad.
The board of directors and advisors – the people with the most power – are all men.
I summarized CF to a Popperian:
Hi! To summarize, over the last 20 years, I’ve tried to improve on Popper in two main areas. First, for logical and other reasons, I don’t think evaluating ideas/arguments by degrees of anything works (usually goodness and weight of evidence, but badness or how well an idea survives criticism for non-justificationists). I created a solution using binary evaluations.
Second, I wanted to make advocacy of critical discussion more concrete, so I worked on debate and discussion methodology, including a proposal that intellectuals should have debate policies that transparently specify in advance what debates they are open to, guide their behavior during those debates, and specify how the debates may end. These policies would help enable error correction instead of arbitrary or biased dismissals of critics, and they parallel favoring the rule of law over the rule of man.
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It’s weird/confusing/problematic how there are two very different things being discussed as AI safety:
- AI potentially killing all humans.
- AI giving people information they asked for which human authorities don’t want them to have.
I’ve heard of the first one. I haven’t heard of the second one. Is that a mainstream worry (I only ever hear of AI killing people)? Or something discussed in AI circles/in books and stuff?
Oh. Are we talking about like giving people information on, let’s say, how to make illegal drugs and stuff like that?
Yeah or weapons is another common example.
It may be stretching definitions but I think some of the weird affirmation incidents also fall into this category.
The “information” being given is like encouragement to commit suicide or similar. Which authorities do not generally want people to receive.
Does that count as information in the same way? Maybe not what you intended but I think it is a form of information.
I think that’s definitely relevant. Also relevant is LLMs telling people to start cults or causing divorces.