Original LessWrong post

Transitioning from a cult to a religion involves a challenging stage during which the original messianic prophet is somehow made to retire, to ultimately be replaced with a more enduring and insitutional means of organizing the group. This is a tricky process that includes extracting the most useful ideological elements from the otherwise incoherent medley of grandiose nonsense that constitutes the original prophet’s teachings. The prophet’s undesirable teachings must be discredited in a way that preserves, or even amplifies, their useful teachings.

One LessWronger makes a contribution to this effort on behalf of Rationalism by providing compelling evidence that Eliezer Yudkowsky does not know more about economics than all mainstream economists.

The economics under consideration involve monetary policy in Japan, of course. Much as crackpot physicists inevitably turn their attention to Einsteinian relativity or quantum superposition, crackpot economists are inevitably drawn to Japanese monetary policy, and EY is no exception.

The specific claim that EY makes is not particularly important; it essentially boils down to “economists believed X would happen, whereas Yudkowsky believed Y would happen, and in one particular instance Yudkowsky was proven to be right”.

But, as this LessWronger shows by using graphs from the U.S. Federal Reserve, Yudkowsky clearly was not right. They find this to be concerning because

…this error undermines a significant part of Yudkowsky’s thesis. This example was one of two major anecdotes that Yudkowsky presented to show that he can often know better than experts, and he cited it repeatedly throughout the book. Yet, I think he got it wrong.

Questioning the prophet is always a risky activity, though, so this LessWronger leaves the obvious implications unsaid. None of the commenters have attempted to defend Yudkowsky’s thesis as of the time of this writing.

One think that I think is worth noting is that this is only an incomplete revelation about EY’s failings as a great thinker in this instance. The thing is, even if Yudkowsky’s prediction had been correct, it still would not constitute compelling evidence that EY knows more about economics than economists do. Given a choice between “event X will happen” or “event Y will happen”, someone who knows nothing about the matter at hand can still make a correct prediction 50% of the time. Yudkowsky’s original reasoning about why a single correct prediction demonstrates his genius was always faulty.

I think that this particular revelation will be difficult for Rationalists to arrive at, though. If Rationalism has any ideological elements that are worth salvaging then its emphasis on mathematical thinking about uncertainty is presumably one of them, but it seems like it will be difficult for them to rectify that with a prophet who clearly does not understand basic probability.

EDIT: There’s also a twitter thread. Upon receiving even mild pushback, the author backtracks and reaffirms the strength of his faith:

I don’t think this error comes close to undermining the whole book. I think lots of people would still benefit from reading it, and I still think the main claims of the book are broadly true.

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