It's been a while since I've engaged in rationalist debates, so I forgot about the slightly condescending, lecturing tone that comes out when you disagree with rationalist figureheads. :) You could simply ask "Can you provide examples" instead of the "If you ____ then I suggest ____" form.
My point wasn't to nit-pick individual predictions, it was a general explanation of how the game is played.
Since Scott Alexander comes up a lot, a few randomly selected predictions that didn't come true:
- He predicted at least $250 million in damages from Black Lives Matter protests.
- He predicted Andrew Yang would win the 2021 NYC mayoral race with 80% certainty (he came in 4th place)
- He gave a 70% chance to Vitamin D being generally recognized as a good COVID treatment
It's also noteworthy to read that a lot of his predictions are about his personal life, his own blogging actions, or [redacted] things. These all get mixed in with a small number of geopolitical, economic, and medical predictions with the net result of bringing his overall accuracy up.
> He predicted at least $250 million in damages from Black Lives Matter protests.
He says
> 5. At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30%
which, by my reading means he assigns it greater-than-even odds that _less_ than $250 million dollars in damages happened (I have no understanding of whether or not this result is the case, but my reading of your post suggests that you believe that this was indeed the outcome).
You say
> He gave a 70% chance to Vitamin D being generally recognized as a good COVID treatment
while he says
> Vitamin D is _not_ generally recognized (eg NICE, UpToDate) as effective COVID treatment: 70%
(emphasis mine)
For what it's worth, your comments in this thread have been very good descriptions of things I became frustrated with after once being quite interested / enthralled with this community / movement!
(I feel like you're probably getting upvotes from people who feel similarly, but sometimes I feel like nobody ever writes "I agree with you" comments, so the impression is that there's only disagreement with some point being made.)
Thanks for sharing. You summed it up well: The community feels like a hidden gem when you first discover it. It feels like there's an energy of intelligence buzzing about interesting topics and sharing new findings.
Then you start encountering the weirder parts. For me, it was the group think and hero worship. I just wanted to read interesting takes on new topics, but if you deviated from the popular narrative associated with the heroes (Scott Alexander, Yudkowski, Cowen, Aaronson, etc.) it felt like the community's immune system identified you as an intruder and started attacking.
I think a lot of people get drawn into the idea of it being a community where they finally belong. Especially on Twitter (where the latest iteration is "TPOT") it's extraordinarily clique-ish and defensive. It feels like high school level social dynamics at play, except the players are equipped with deep reserves of rhetoric and seemingly endless free time to dunk on people and send their followers after people who disagree. It's a very weird contrast to the ideals claimed by the community.
Well nobody sent me; instead I had the strange experience of waking up this morning, seeing an interesting post about Scott Aaronson identifying as a rationalist, and when I check the discussion it's like half of HN has decided it's a good opportunity to espouse everything they dislike about this group of people.
Since when is that what we do here? If he'd written that he'd decided to become vegetarian, would we all be out here talking about how vegetarians are so annoying and one of them even spat on my hamburger one time?
And then of these uncalled-for takedowns, several -- including yours -- don't even seem to be engaging in good-faith discourse, and seem happy to pile on to attacks even when they're completely at odds with their own arguments.
I'm sorry to say it but the one who decided to use their free time to leer at people un-provoked over the internet seems to be you.
Seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to discuss in the comments on this article, and I don't know which other "takedowns" you're referring to, but this person's comments on it have not been in bad faith at all.
(Indeed, I think it's in worse faith to try to guilt trip people who are just expressing critical opinions. It's fine - good, even! - to disagree with those people, but this particular comment has a very "how dare you criticize something!" tone that I don't think is constructive.)
That sounds an awful lot like other people making stuff up to oppress me by sticking a "condescending" label to me without me having any way to contest it.
That sounds an awful lot like a victimhood complex.
"Are you being condescending" is a subjective judgement that other people will make up their own minds about. You can't control what people think about things you say and do, and they aren't "oppressing" you by making up their own minds about that.
> it was a general explanation of how the game is played.
You seem to be trying to insinuate that Alexander et. al. are pretending to know how things will turn out and then hiding behind probabilities when they don't turn out that way. This is missing the point completely. The point is that when Alexander assigns an 80% probability to many different outcomes, about 80% of them should occur, and it should not be clear to anyone (including Alexander) ahead of time which 80%.
> He predicted at least $250 million in damages from Black Lives Matter protests.
Edit: I see that the prediction relates to 2021 specificially. In the wake of 2020, I think it was perfectly reasonable to make such a prediction at that confidence level, even if it didn't actually turn out that way.
> He predicted Andrew Yang would win the 2021 NYC mayoral race with 80% certainty (he came in 4th place)
> He gave a 70% chance to Vitamin D being generally recognized as a good COVID treatment
If you make many predictions at 70-80% confidence, as he does, you should expect 20-30% of them not to come true. It would in fact be a failure (underconfidence) if they all came true. You are in fact citing a blog post that is exactly about a self-assessment of those confidence levels.
Also, he gave a 70% chance to Vitamin D not being generally recognized as a good COVID treatment.
> These all get mixed in with a small number of geopolitical, economic, and medical predictions with the net result of bringing his overall accuracy up.
The point is not "overall accuracy", but overall calibration - i.e., whether his assigned probabilities end up making sense and being statistically validated.
You have done nothing to establish that any correlation between the category of prediction and his accuracy on them.
I genuinely don't understand how you can point to someone's calibration curve where they've broadly done well, and cherry pick the failed predictions they made, and use this not just to claim that they're making bad predictions but that they're slimy about admitting error. What more could you possibly want from someone than a tally of their prediction record graded against the probability they explicitly assigned to it?
lol, what? That was a civil comment. This seems like an excellent example of the point being made. Replying to a perfectly reasonable but critical comment with "please be civil" is super condescending.
So is stuff like "one man's modus ponens".
Look, we get it, you're talking to people who found this stuff smart and interesting in the past. But we got tired of it. For me, I realized after awhile that the people I most admired in real life were pretty much the opposite of the people I was reading the most on the internet. None of the smartest people I know talk in this snooty online iamsosmart style.
> This isn’t about me being an expert on these topics and getting them exactly right, it’s about me calibrating my ability to tell how much I know about things and how certain I am.
> At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30%
Aurornis:
> I forgot about the slightly condescending, lecturing tone that comes out when you disagree with rationalist figureheads.
> Since Scott Alexander comes up a lot, a few randomly selected predictions that didn't come true:
> He predicted at least $250 million in damages from Black Lives Matter protests.
Is this a "perfectly reasonable but critical comment"?
Am I condescending if I say that predicting a 30% chance that something happens means predicting a 70% chance that it won't happen... so the fact that it didn't happen probably shouldn't be used as "gotcha!"?
(I did waffle upon re-reading my comment and thinking it could have been more civil. But then decided that this person is also being very thin skinned. So I think you're right that we're both right.)
My point wasn't to nit-pick individual predictions, it was a general explanation of how the game is played.
Since Scott Alexander comes up a lot, a few randomly selected predictions that didn't come true:
- He predicted at least $250 million in damages from Black Lives Matter protests.
- He predicted Andrew Yang would win the 2021 NYC mayoral race with 80% certainty (he came in 4th place)
- He gave a 70% chance to Vitamin D being generally recognized as a good COVID treatment
This is just random samples from the first blog post that popped in Google: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/grading-my-2021-predictions
It's also noteworthy to read that a lot of his predictions are about his personal life, his own blogging actions, or [redacted] things. These all get mixed in with a small number of geopolitical, economic, and medical predictions with the net result of bringing his overall accuracy up.