Collectivist

Wytham Abbey is being listed on the open market for £15 million [...] Adjusted for inflation, the purchase price of the house two years ago now equals £16.2 million.

Remember when one of their justifications was that it's also an investment?

Reaction on the EA forum:

It's not necessarily a loss of a million pounds if many of the events that happened there would have spent money to organise events elsewhere (renting event spaces and accommodation for event attendees can get quite pricey) and would have spent additional time on organising the events, finding venues, setting them up etc (compared to having them at Wytham). For comparison, EA Global events cost in the ballpark of a million pounds per event.

I actually don't find this a bad post, but I do want to point out that it got way more karma than any of titotals more critical posts, even though I find many of them better. This once again points to how the EA Forum's voting-power-by-popularity karma system creates groupthink; being critical nets you less voting power than being lauditory, and it disincentivizes calling out bullshit in general.

When Ives Parr of "Effective Altruism is when you want to spend money on genetic engineering for race-and-IQ theories" fame, made a seperate post complaining that that post got downvoted despite nobody giving a good counterargument, I wanted to comment and call him out on his bullshit, but why bother with a karma system that allows him and his buddies to downvote it out of the frontpage while leaving you with less voting power? A lot of EA's missteps are just one off blunders, but what makes the EA forum's """epistocratic""" voting system so much worse is that it's systematic, every post and comment is now affected by this calculus of how much you can criticize the people with a lot of power on the forum without losing power of your own, making groupthink almost inevitable. Given the fact that people who are on the forum longer have on average more voting power than newer voices, I can't help but wonder if this is by design.

It was a chateau in the Czech Republic

It wasn't CEA/EV like with the other 'castle', but it was an organization that had its own tag on the EA forum, so at the very least EA-aligned.

I have a tremendously large skull (like XXL hats) - maybe that's why I can still do some basic math after the testosterone brain poison during puberty? [...] Now I'm looking at tech billionaires. Mostly lo-T looking men. Elon Musk & Jeff Bezos were big & bald but seem to have pretty big skulls to compensate

Mark phrenology off your bingo cards, Foppington's law strikes again:

Once bigotry or self-loathing permeate a given community, it is only a matter of time before deep metaphysical significance is assigned to the shape of human skulls.

I would've suggested that we call ourselves the megaforecasters to one-up them, but then they might start calling themselves the überforecasters.

They have to call it Arya, because No-one takes them seriously

embrace the narrative that “SBF died for our sins”

Huh? This is so absurdly self-aggrandizing that I struggle to comprehend what he's even saying. What did he imagine "our sins" were, and how did getting imprisoned absolve them?

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)

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.

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.

The sense of counter-intuitivity here seems mostly to be generated by the convoluted grammar of your summarising assessment, but this is just an example of bare recursivity, since you’re applying the language of the post to the post itself.

I don't think it's counter-intuitive and the post itself never mentioned 'epistemic luck'.

Perhaps it would be interesting if we were to pick out authentic Gettier cases which are also accusations of some kind

This seems easy enough to contstruct, just base an accusation on a Gettier case. So in the case of the stopped clock, say we had an appointment at 6:00 and due to my broken watch I think it’s 7:00, as it so happens it actually is 7:00. When I accuse you of being an hour late it is a "Gettier attack", it's a true accusation, but it isn’t based on knowledge because it is based on a Gettier case.

While the writer is wrong, the post itself is actually quite interesting and made me think more about epistemic luck. I think Zack does correctly point out cases where I would say rationalists got epistemically lucky, although his views on the matter seem entirely different. I think this quote is a good microcosm of this post:

The Times's insinuation that Scott Alexander is a racist like Charles Murray seems like a "Gettier attack": the charge is essentially correct, even though the evidence used to prosecute the charge before a jury of distracted New York Times readers is completely bogus.

A "Gettier attack" is a very interesting concept I will keep in my back pocket, but he clearly doesn't know what a Gettier problem is. With a Gettier case a belief is both true and justified, but still not knowledge because the usually solid justification fails unexpectedly. The classic example is looking at your watch and seeing it's 7:00, believing it's 7:00, and it actually is 7:00, but it isn't knowledge because the usually solid justification of "my watch tells the time" failed unexpectedly when your watch broke when it reached 7:00 the last time and has been stuck on 7:00 ever since. You got epistemically lucky.

So while this isn't a "Gettier attack" Zack did get at least a partial dose of epistemic luck. He believes it isn't justified and therefore a Gettier attack, but in fact, you need justification for a Gettier attack, and it is justified, so he got some epistemic luck writing about epistemic luck. This is what a good chunk of this post feels like.