Many people have strong emotional reaction to certain names of values. Humans seem to confuse map with the territory more often we are in excited mood.

I think most disagreements could be avoided by just avoiding the common names for values. This can be done by being more explicit. The names do not help anyway, because everybody understands these emotional value words differently anyway.

To me it seems that the cliques are based on the differences in the interpretations of these value words.

Perhaps ‘collecting the most people serious about this goal’ should rank lower as a goal of the site than making sure rationalists have a better reputation than salespeople and lawyers.

Before you make good on your promise to take the ball and go home, you might consider an EY style series/intuitive write-up on Bayesian disagreement.

And dammit, get Cowen on that Bloggingheads.

Also, I don’t think that we have done poorly. OB has become a very popular blog, attracted a very capable community, and effectively disseminated some important ideas.

To me, the most important failures in OB come from not even attempting what seems to me to be the most urgent issue, construction of a convincing argument for someone who doesn’t already pursue truth that thy would be better off by their own values if they did so.

Eliezer, even if many disagreements are secretly about values, if arguing basic values is expensive to community conversation health, that suggests we have a limited budget of disagreement causes we can expose. Spend your budget carefully.

Soulless, if no-nonsense styles are just as easily used for propaganda as other styles, then why do so many authors in so many fields explicitly say that they use it to show they are avoiding propaganda, with most of their readers believing they in fact do more avoid propaganda? Are these readers all just mistaken?

There is an exactly analogous problem in AI research. AI is a pre-paradigm field: there is no shared commitment, few common terms, little agreement on what the real problems are. This is evident by looking at the standard text (Russell and Norvig) and observing that the chapters don’t really have anything to do with one another. AI is a just a grab-bag of ideas that people thought had something to do with intelligence.

This, incidentally, is why I consider Rodney Brooks to be one of the great philosophers of AI (contra Eliezer). Not because of his technical ideas, but because he proposed a paradigm within which AI could move forward. The paradigm is: build robots, put them in the real world, observe the problems they encounter, and then solve those problems. Now, this paradigm has some deficiencies, but it is at least articulable. It at least provides a reality-driven principle for guiding research. Researchers cannot dream up logical puzzles, then create systems that solve those puzzles, and claim they have solved an important problem in AI – Brooks called this “puzzlitis”.

If a whole bunch of really smart people focus on that, you might get something like Arnold Kling’s depiction of modern macroeconomics – castles of mathematical models completely divorced from reality. Or Peter Thiel’s depiction of statistical arbitrage – fancy computer algorithms for predicting how stocks will move next week with no understanding at all of how the global financial system works.

I think we scientists have an attraction to simple concepts like economic efficiency, and fields like mathematics, because we love optimizing based on clear rules. This is why I like games. But the big problems in life are messy and foundational. To me, avoiding them is sticking your head in the sand.

And anyway, most groups working on a problem have a goal in mind. Shared assumptions are useful inasmuch as they help achieve shared goals. To throw any discussion out of shared assumptions out of the window risks having bad assumptions get calcified.

Such topics should be avoided only insofar as the people involved are incapable of discussing them dispassionately.

And what I meant was that apparently serious, no-nonsense styles can be just as readily used to disguise non-informational intent as more flashy styles can, by couching shaky argument in a manner that sounds professional. e.g., use of obfuscating jargon or mathematical reasoning not anchored to concrete measurement. While you personally may be comfortable with formal style, and do communicate well that way, you seem to reference the benefits of such a style in a manner that indicates a lack of awareness that some people will interpret use of such a style as indicative of deception, not clarity.