Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles — LessWrong
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> It was not the sight of Mitchum that made him sit still in horror. It was the realization that there was no one he could call to expose this thing…

content warning: Zack Davis. so of course this is merely the intro to Zack’s unquenchable outrage at Yudkowsky using the pronouns that someone wants to be called by

  • @CollectivistEnglish
    8•4 months ago

    It made me think of epistemic luck in the rat-sphere in general, him inventing then immediately fumbling ‘gettier attack’ is just such a perfect example, but there are other examples in there such as Yud saying:

    Personally, I’m used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish[…]

    Which @200fifty points out:

    Zack is actually correct that this is a pretty wild thing to say… “Rest assured that I considered all possible counterarguments against my position which I was able to generate with my mega super brain. No, I haven’t actually looked at the arguments against my position, but I’m confident in my ability to think of everything that people who disagree with me would say.” It so happens that Yudkowsky is on the ‘right side’ politically in this particular case, but man, this is real sloppy for someone who claims to be on the side of capital-T truth.

    • @YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAMEnglish
      3•4 months ago

      I suppose I get it, although I’m still a bit unsure how these examples count as “epistemic luck”

      • @CollectivistEnglish
        3•4 months ago

        Zack thought the Times had all the justification they needed (for a Gettier case) since he thought they 1) didn’t have a good justification but 2) also didn’t need a good justification. He was wrong about his second assumption (they did need a good justification), but also wrong about the first assumption (they did have a good justification), so they cancelled each other out, and his conclusion ‘they have all the justification they need’ is correct through epistemic luck.

        The strongest possible argument supports the right conclusion. Yud thought he could just dream up the strongest arguments and didn’t need to consult the literature to reach the right conclusion. Dreaming up arguments is not going to give you the strongest arguments, while consulting the literature will. However, one of the weaker arguments he dreamt up just so happened to also support the right conclusion, so he got the right answer through epistemic luck.

        • @YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAMEnglish
          5•4 months ago

          Ooooh I get it for Yudkowsky now, I thought you were targeting something else in his comment, on Davis I remain a bit confused, because previously you seemed to be saying that his epistemic luck was in having come up with the term - but this cannot be an example of epistemic luck because there is nothing (relevantly) epistemic in coming up with a term

          • @CollectivistEnglish
            3•4 months ago

            No no, not the term (my comment is about how he got his own term wrong), just his reasoning. If you make a lot of reasoning errors, but two faulty premises cancel each other out, and you write, say, 17000 words or sequences of hundreds of blog posts, then you’re going to stumble into the right conclusion from time to time. (It might be fun to model this mathematically, can you err your way into being unerring?, but unfortunately in reality-land the amount of premises an argument needs varies wildly)

            • @swlabrEnglish
              6•4 months ago

              If I had to pick a mathematical model, it’d be a drunken walk.

            • @YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAMEnglish
              4•4 months ago

              I had a long reply which i think made some errors of interpretation as to what you’re saying. I find this “cancels” language confusing, but I don’t have the energy to do any more in-depth clarification on this thing!