It is bad when people who are consistently egregiously wrong become deferred to on everything
My Objections to "We’re All Gonna Die with Eliezer Yudkowsky" — LessWrong
Introduction I recently watched Eliezer Yudkowsky's appearance on the Bankless podcast, where he argued that AI was nigh-certain to end humanity. Sin…
The Death Of Expertise
To reject the notion of expertise, and to replace it with a sanctimonious insistence that every person has a right to his or her own opinion, is silly.
Common Causes of Very Bad Decisions
Italian psychologist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini was once asked why people keep making the same mistakes.
My Objections to "We’re All Gonna Die with Eliezer Yudkowsky" — AI Alignment Forum
Introduction I recently watched Eliezer Yudkowsky's appearance on the Bankless podcast, where he argued that AI was nigh-certain to end humanity. Sin…
Centrist imaginations
A response to a bad article, a bad book, and a bad publication
Capturing our Attention
What are the harms of misinformation? It’s widely believed that it causes false belief, including false beliefs in quite bizarre claims. I argue that this threat is greatly exaggerated: while plaus...
Knowledge tech that's subtly wrong is more dangerous than tech that's obviously wrong. (Or, where I disagree with Robin Sloan.)
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
The phony comforts of useful idiots
On Casey Newton and the shallowness of anti-skepticism.
Via Negativa: The Process of Making Good Decisions By Eliminating Bad Ones
When we set goals—both personal and professional—we tend to focus on what we should do, rather than focussing on what we should avoid. Humans naturally know more about what is wrong, what is bad, what is harmful, or what won’t work, more than they know about what is right and what would work.
The mistake we all make... and the simple experiment that reveals it
Your answer reveals how you see the world – and the common error that hampers our decision making. In an extract from his new book, psychologist Richard Nisbett reveals the ‘mindware’ to help us think smarter
Epistemic assholes
In this paper, I develop and defend the concept epistemic assholes. An epistemic asshole is someone who exhibits a distinctive form of epistemic badness characterized not by gross irrationality or hostility to truth, but by a stable, entitled disregard for one’s epistemic relations with others. Drawing on Aaron James’s (2012) account of moral assholes, I examine how people can systematically exploit epistemic cooperation by allowing themselves special advantages—such as “freedom from inquiry”, “doxastic comfort”, and “freedom to criticize”—while remaining insulated from criticism by an entrenched sense of entitlement. The resulting view, the Relational Approach to Epistemic Assholes (REA), explains why epistemic assholes are not epistemically the worst, yet are nonetheless deeply galling. After motivating the need for this concept, I show how REA captures both “impure” cases (involving both epistemic and moral assholery) and “pure” epistemic assholes, whose objectionable conduct is driven by epistemic aims themselves. I further explore connections between epistemic assholes and epistemic vice, and the causal role that epistemic assholery can play in active ignorance and epistemic exploitation. Through this latter connection, I argue that epistemic assholes play an insidious causal role in sustaining objectionable social power dynamics. The concept of epistemic assholes provides a valuable lens for understanding important but often-hidden hazards in our social epistemic environment.
Narratives
What Elon Musk got wrong about Twitter, journalists and VCs got wrong about FTX, and Peter Thiel got wrong about crypto and AI — and why I made many of the same mistakes along the way.
The Cult of Bayes' Theorem
I'm no longer a skeptic, but still I can't resist the old skeptic urge to do a bit of debunking. After all, there are a lot of crackpots out there. There are people, for example, who believe that a superintelligent computer will arise in the next twenty years and then promptly either destroy humanity or cure death and set us free. There are people who believe that one of the best works of English literature is an unfinished Harry Potter fanfic by someone who can barely write a comprehensible English sentence. There are even people who believe the best thing you can do to help the poor and the starving is become a city stockbroker or Silicon Valley entrepreneur! And more often than not, the same people believe all these crazy things!
Contra Ptacek's Terrible Article On AI — Ludicity
A few days ago, I was presented with an article titled “My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts” by Thomas Ptacek. I thought it was not very good, and didn't give it a second thought. To quote the formidable Baldur Bjarnason:
Believing misinformation is a “win” for some people, even when proven false
Winning" means prioritizing independence from outside influence over being right.
Curse of knowledge
The curse of knowledge, also called the curse of expertise[1] or expert's curse, is a cognitive bias that occurs when a person who has specialized knowledge assumes that others share in that knowledge.[2]