the original post is pretty obviously a sneer on the experiment and not on yudkowsky, but no, it must be that we're just all low decoupler conflict theorists who can't even sneer right
FWIW, I think it does. You know, correct contrarianism is kinda the entire shtick of this whole rationalism thing.
No "good rationalist" should accept "the stuff of intro psych textbooks" as an excuse for misjudgements. To be fair, he is in good company (see eg Kahnemann on the replication crisis).
But EY has, unquestionably, failed by his own standards in this respect.
Scientific research is holy writ from on high, filled with pure and unassailable truth. Or it has some noticeable flaw or even just a slight whiff of of bias from one of the authors, in which case it's nothing but scurrilous lies not even worth acknowledging.
I know this isn't a terribly original sneer, but I do continue to be disappointed that a community that lionizes probabilistic reasoning consistently fails to approach academic topics with any level of credulity other than 0% or 100%.
But look at the way the community treats stuff. Any article, however shoddy, that is quant and in a journal of a prestige science (nat sci, biology, psychology, maybe econ) is treated as basically incontrovertible (and especially so if it could support rightwing conclusions). Any research from other social sciences is ignored entirely.
It depends who you count as 'the community as a whole' and also on the subject concerned. Things not very political tend to produce better discussions of evidence. Anything to do even remotely with the so-called 'culture wars' is a miasma of encouraging bias.
While you nicely summarized the things, I'd object to:
>It was possible to call, because some people did.
In order to use this as evidence, ~you~ Scott need to put in a little more effort. Reductio ad absurdum: Of course last weeks lottery numbers were possible to call, because some people did.
Yeah this joins Milgram, Stanford, etc with all these classic 1950s ideas of how all of society is a set of brutal cavemen only just held together by the thin veneer of civilisation.
Is Middle Grove experimental setup any less manipulated? Is Robbers
Cave less representative of a real situation? Those two cases both have
a place in social science, I believe.
Now, this would be informative for research into tribalism,
especially into how smaller communities rip apart or survive the culture
war.
In any case, it seems I’m extremely prejudiced against Guardian. I
can’t help but read this piece uncharitably, as “we’d have our
communistic classless utopia by now, if not for those pesky lying
Sherifs shilling for Rockefellers”. Am I the only one?
In fact, I see this as an attack on uncomfortable social science
results in general.
Ah yes the Guardian, newspaper of LibDems who think they are more progressive than they really are because they shop at Waitrose, is part of a grand conspiracy to deny SocioTruths about communism
I don’t think that believing it reflects badly on EY; this was the stuff of intro psych textbooks. But, yeah, shitty science is a thing.
you’ll be relieved to know our freinds have seen the real issues at the heart of the matter
It’s an interesting piece, but I’m not sure if this is supposed to debunk in-group/out-group effects or something?