The Singularity Institute's Arrogance Problem

(I hope this doesn't come across as overly critical because I'd love to see this problem fixed. I'm not dissing rationality, just its current implementation. You have declared Crocker's Rules before, so I'm giving you an emotional impression of what your recent rationality propaganda articles look like to me, and I hope that doesn't come across as an attack, but something that can be improved upon.)

I think many of your claims of rationality powers (about yourself and other SIAI members) look really self-congratulatory and, well, lame. SIAI plainly doesn't appear all that awesome to me, except at explaining how some old philosophical problems have been solved somewhat recently.

You claim that SIAI people know insane amounts of science and update constantly, but you can't even get 1 out of 200 volunteers to spread some links?! Frankly, the only publicly visible person who strikes me as having some awesome powers is you, and from reading CSA, you seem to have had high productivity (in writing and summarizing) before you ever met LW.

Maybe there are all these awesome feats I just never get to see because I'm not at SIAI, but I've seen similar levels of confidence in your methods and weak results in the New Age circles I hung out in years ago. Your beliefs are much saner, but as long as you can't be more effective than them, I'll always have a problem taking you seriously.

In short, as you yourself noted, you lack a Tim Ferriss. Even for technical skills, there isn't much I can point at and say, "holy shit, this is amazing and original, I wanna learn how to do that, have all my monies!".

(This has little to do with the soundness of SIAI's claims about Intelligence Explosion etc., though, but it does decrease my confidence that conclusions reached through your epistemic rationality are to be trusted if the present results seem so lacking.)

My #1 suggestion, by a big margin, is to generate more new formal math results.

My #2 suggestion is to communicate more carefully, like Holden Karnofsky or Carl Shulman. Eliezer's tone is sometimes too preachy.

SI is arrogant because it pretends to be even better than science, while failing to publish in significant scientific papers. If this does not seem like a pseudoscience or cult, I don't know what does.

So please either stop pretending to be so great or prove it! For starters, it is not necessary to publish a paper about AI; you can choose any other topic.

No offense; I honestly think you are all awesome. But there are some traditional ways to prove one's skills, and if you don't accept the challenge, you look like wimps. Even if the ritual is largely a waste of time (all signals are costly), there are thousands of people who have passed it, so a group of x-rational gurus should be able to use their magical powers and do it in five minutes, right?

in combination with his lack of technical publication

I think it would help for EY to submit more of his technical work for public judgment. Clear proof of technical skill in a related domain makes claims less likely to come off as arrogant. For that matter it also makes people more willing to accept actions that they do perceive as arrogant.

The claim made that donating to the SIAI is the charity donation with the highest expected return* always struck me as rather arrogant, though I can see the logic behind it.

The problem is firstly that its an extremely self serving statement, (equivalent to "giving us money is the best thing you can ever possibly do") even if true its credibility is reduced by the claim coming from the same person who would benefit from it.

Secondly it requires me to believe a number of claims which individually require a burden of proof, and gain more from the conjunction. Including: "Strong AI is possible," "friendly AI is possible," "The actions of the SIAI will significantly effect the results of investigations into FAI," and "the money I donate will significantly improve the effectiveness of the SIAI's research" (I expect the relationship between research efffectiveness and funding isn't linear). All of which I only have your word for.

Thirdly, contrast this with other charities who are known to be very effective and can prove it, and whose results affect presently suffering people (e.g. Against malaria).

Caveat, I'm not arguing any of the claims are wrong, but all the arguments I have for it come from people with an incentive in getting me to donate so I have reasonable grounds for questioning the whole construct from outside the argument.

*Can't remember the exact wording but that was the takeaway of a headline in the last fundraiser.

Having been through a Physics grad school (albeit not of a Caltech caliber), I can confirm that lack of (a real or false) modesty is a major red flag, and a tell-tale of a crank. Hawking does not refer to the black-hole radiation as Hawking radiation, and Feynman did not call his diagrams Feynman diagrams, at least not in public. A thorough literature review in the introduction section of any worthwhile paper is a must, unless you are Einstein, or can reference your previous relevant paper where you dealt with it.

Since EY claims to be doing math, he should be posting at least a couple of papers a year on arxiv.org (cs.DM or similar), properly referenced and formatted to conform with the prevailing standard (probably LaTeXed), and submit them for conference proceedings and/or into peer-reviewed journals. Anything less would be less than rational.

I've asked around a bit, and we can't recall when exactly EY claimed "world-class mathematical ability". As far as I can remember, he's been pretty up-front about wishing he were better at math. I seem to remember him looking for a math-savvy assistant at one point.

If this is the case, it sounds like EY has a Chuck Norris problem, i.e., his mythos has spread beyond its reality.

There's a phrase that the tech world uses to describe the kind of people you want to hire: "smart, and gets things done." I'm willing to grant "smart", but what about the other one?

The sequences and HPMoR are fantastic introductory/outreach writing, but they're all a few years old at this point. The rhetoric about SI being more awesome than ever doesn't square with the trend I observe* in your actual productivity. To be blunt, why are you happy that you're doing less with more?

*I'm sure I don't know everything SI has actually done in the last year, but that's a problem too.

I agree with what has been said about the modesty norm of academia; I speculate that it arises because if you can avoid washing out of the first-year math courses, you're already one or two standard deviations above average, and thus you are in a population in which achievements that stood out in a high school (even a good one) are just not that special. Bragging about your SAT scores, or even your grades, begins to feel a bit like bragging about your "Participant" ribbon from sports day. There's also the point that the IQ distribution in a good physics department is not Gaussian; it is the top end of a Gaussian, sliced off. In other words, there's a lower bound and an exponential frequency decay from there. Thus, most people in a physics department are on the lower end of their local peer group. I speculate that this discourages bragging because the mass of ordinary plus-two-SDs doesn't want to be reminded that they're not all that bright.

However, all that aside: Are academics the target of this blog, or of lukeprog's posts? Propaganda, to be effective, should reach the masses, not the elite - although there's something to be said for "Get the elite and the masses will follow", to be sure. Although academics are no doubt over-represented among LessWrong readers and indeed among regular blog readers, still they are not the whole world. Can we show that a glowing listing of not-very-specific awesomenesses is counterproductive to the average LW reader, or the average prospective recruit who might be pointed to lukeprog's post? If not, the criticism rather misses its mark. Academics can always be pointed to the Sequences instead; what we're missing is a quick introduction for the plus-one-SD who is not going to read three years of blog output.

I've reccommended this before, I think.

I think that you should get Eliezer to say the accurate but arrogant sounding things, because everyone already knows he's like that. You should yourself, Luke, be more careful about maintaining a humble opinion.

If you need people to say arrogant things, make them ghost-write for Eliezer.

Personally, I think that a lot of Eliezer's arrogance is deserved. He's explained most of the big questions in philosophy either by personally solving them or by brilliantly summarizing other people's problems. CFAI was way ahead of its time, as TDT still is. So he can feel smug. He's got a reputation as an arrogant eccentric genius anyway.

But the rest of the organisation should try to be more careful. You should imitate Carl Shulman rather than Eliezer.

What should SI do about this?

I think that separating instrumental rationality from the Singularity/FAI ideas will help. Hopefully this project is coming along nicely.

(I was going to write a post on 'why I'm skeptical about SIAI', but I guess this thread is a good place to put it. This was written in a bit of a rush - if it sounds like I am dissing you guys, that isn't my intention.)

I think the issue isn't so much 'arrogance' per se - I don't think many of your audience would care about accurate boasts - but rather your arrogance isn't backed up with any substantial achievement:

You say you're right on the bleeding edge in very hard bits of technical mathematics ("we have 30-40 papers which could be published on decision theory" in one of lukeprogs Q&As, wasn't it?), yet as far as I can see none of you have published anything in any field of science. The problem is (as far as I can tell) you've been making the same boasts about all these advances you are making for years, and they've never been substantiated.

You say you've solved all these important philosophical questions (Newcomb, Quantum mechanics, Free will, physicalism, etc.), yet your answers are never published, and never particularly impress those who are actual domain experts in these things - indeed, a complaint I've heard commonly is that Lesswrong just simply misunderstand the basics. An example: I'm pretty good at philosophy of religion, and the sort of arguments Lesswrong seems to take as slam-dunks for Atheism ("biases!" "Kolmogorov complexity!") just aren't impressive, or even close to the level of discussion seen in academia. This itself is no big deal (ditto the MWI, phil of mind), but it makes for an impression of being intellectual dilettantes spouting off on matters you aren't that competent in. (I'm pretty sure most analytic philospohers roll their eyes at all the 'tabooing' and 'dissolving problems' - they were trying to solve philosophy that way 80 years ago!) Worse, my (admittedly anecdotal) survey suggests a pretty mixed reception from domain-experts in stuff that really matters to your project, like probability theory, decision theory etc.

You also generally talk about how awesome you all are via the powers of rationalism, yet none of you have done anything particularly awesome by standard measures of achievement. Writing a forest of blog posts widely reputed to be pretty good doesn't count. Nor does writing lots of summaries of modern cogsci and stuff.

It is not all bad. Because there are lots of people who are awesome by conventional metrics and do awesome things who take you guys seriously, and meeting these people has raised my confidence that you guys are doing something interesting. But reflected esteem can only take you so far.

So my feeling is basically 'put up or shut up'. You guys need to build a record of tangible/'real world' achievements, like writing some breakthrough papers on decision theory (or any papers on anything) which are published and taken seriously in mainstream science, a really popular book on 'everyday rationality', going off and using rationality to make zillions from the stock market, or whatever. I gather you folks are trying to do some of these: great! Until then, though, your 'arrogance problem' is simply that you promise lots and do little.

I think Eli as being the main representative of SI, should be more careful of how he does things, and resist his natural instinct to declare people stupid (-> Especially <- if he's basically right)

Case in point: http://www.sl4.org/archive/0608/15895.html That could have been handled more politically and with more face-saving for the victim. Now you have this guy and at least one "friend" with loads of free time going around putting down anything associated with Eliezer or SI on the Internet. For 5 minutes of extra thinking and not typing this could have been largely avoided. Eli has to realize that he's in a good position to needlessly hurt his (and our) own causes.

Another case in point was handling the Roko affair. There is doing the right thing, but you can do it without being an asshole (also IMO the "ownership" of LW policies is still an unresolved issue, but at least it's mostly "between friends"). If something like this needs to be done Eli needs to pass the keyboard to cooler heads.

Why don't SIAI researchers decide to definitively solve some difficult unsolved mathematics, programming, or engineering problem as proof of their abilities?

Yes it would waste time that could have been spent on AI-related philosophy but would unambiguously support the competency of SIAI.

There are two recurring themes: peer-reviewed technical results, and intellectual firepower.

If you want to show people intellectual firepower and the awesomeness of your conversations, tape the conversations. Just walk around with a recorder going all day, find the interesting bits later, and put them up for people to listen to.

But... you're not selling "we're super bright," you're selling "we're super effective." And for that you need effectiveness. Earnest, bright people wasting their effort is an old thing, and with as goals as large as yours it's difficult to see the difference between progress and floundering.

I don't know how to address your particular signalling problem. But a question I need answered for myself: I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the SIAI folks being "reasonably good at math and science" and "actually being really good - the kind of good they'd need to be for me to give them my money."

ARE there straightforward tests you could hypothetically take (or which some of you may have taken) which probably wouldn't actually satisfy academics, but which are perfectly reasonable benchmarks we should expect you to be able to complete to demonstrate your equivalent education?

What are the most egregious examples of SI's arrogance?

Public tantrums, shouting and verbal abuse. Those are status displays that pay off for tribal chieftans and some styles of gang leader. They aren't appropriate for leaders of intellectually oriented charities. Eliezer thinking he can get away with that is the biggest indicator of arrogance that I've noticed thus far.

What SIAI could do to help the image problem: Get credible grown-ups on board.

The main team looks to be in their early thirties, and the visiting fellows mostly students in their twenties. With the claims of importance SIAI is making, people go looking for people over forty who are well-established as serious thinkers, AI experts or similarly known-competent folk in a relevant field. There should be either some sufficiently sold on the SIAI agenda to be actually on board full-time, or quite a few more in some kind of endorsing partnership role. Currently there's just Ray Kurzweil on the team page, and beyond "Singularity Summit Co-Founder", there's nothing there saying just what his relation to SIAI is, exactly. SIAI doesn't appear to be suitably convincing to have gotten any credible grown-ups as full-time team members.

There are probably good reasons why this isn't useful for what SIAI is actually trying to do, but the demographic of thirty-somethings leading the way and twenty-somethings doing stuff looks way iffier at a glance for "support us in solving the most important philosophical, societal and technological problem humanity has ever faced once and for all!" than it does for "we're doing a revolutionary Web 3.0 SaaS multi mobile OS cloud computing platform!"

To be honest, I've only ever felt SI/EY/LW's "arrogance" once, and I think that LW in general is pretty damn awesome. (I realize I'm equating LW with SI, but I don't really know what SI does)

The one time is while reading through the Free Willhttp://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will page, which I've copied here: "One of the easiest hard questions, as millennia-old philosophical dilemmas go. Though this impossible question is fully and completely dissolved on Less Wrong, aspiring reductionists should try to solve it on their own. "

This smacks strongly of "oh look, there's a classic stumper, and I'm the ONLY ONE who's solved it (naa naa naa). If you want to be a true rationalist/join the tribe, you better solve it on your own, too"

I've also heard others mention that HP from HPMoR is an unsufferable little twat, which I assume is the same attitude they would have if they were to read LW.

I've written some of my thoughts up about the arrogance issue here. The short version is that some people have strongly developed identities as "not one of those pretentious people" and have strong immune responses when encountering intelligence. http://moderndescartes.blogspot.com/2011/07/turn-other-cheek.html

What are the most egregious examples of SI's arrogance?

Well, you do tend to talk about "saving the world" a lot. That makes it sound like you, Eliezer Yudkowsky, plus a few other people are the new Justice League. That sounds at least a little arrogant...

If it helps at all, another data point (not quite answers to your questions):

• I'm a complete SI outsider. My exposure to it is entirely indirectly through Less Wrong, which from time to time seems to function as a PR/fundraising/visibility tool for SI.
• I have no particular opinion about SI's arrogance or non-arrogance as an organization, or EY's arrogance or non-arrogance as an individual. They certainly don't demonstrate humility, nor do they claim to, but there's a wide middle ground between the two.
• I doubt I would be noticeably more likely to donate money, or to encourage others to donate money, if SI convinced me that it was now 50% less arrogant than it was in 2011.
• One thing that significantly lowers my likelihood of donating to SI is my estimate that the expected value of SI's work is negligible, and that the increase/decrease in that EV based on my donations is even more so. It's not clear what SI can really do to increase my EV-of-donating, though.
• Similar to the comment you quote, someone's boasts:accomplishments ratio is directly proportional to my estimate that they are crackpots. OTOH, I find it likely that without the boasting and related monkey dynamics, SI would not receive the funding it has today, so it's not clear that adopting a less boastful stance is actually a good idea from SI's perspective. (I'm taking as given that SI wants to continue to exist and to increase its funding.)
• Just to be clear what I mean by "boasts," here... throughout the sequences EY frequently presents himself as possessing the intellectual horsepower and insight to transform the world in "impossible" ways and holding back from doing so only because he possesses the unusual wisdom to realize that doing so is immoral. I don't think that much is at all controversial, but if you really want specific instances I might be motivated to go back through and find some. (Probably not, though.)

There are two obvious options:

The first, boring option is to make fewer bold claims. I personally would not prefer that you take this tack. It would be akin to shooting yourselves in the foot. If all of your claims vis-a-vis saving the world are couched in extremely humble signaling packages, no one will want to ever give you any money.

The second, much better option is to start doing amazing, high-visibility things worthy of that arrogance. Muflax points out that you don't have a Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss is an interesting case specifically because he is a huge self-promoter who people actually like despite the fact that he makes his living largely by boasting entertainingly. The reason Tim Ferriss can do this is because he delivers. He has accomplished the things he is making claims about - or at least he convinces you that he is qualified to talk about it.

I really want a Rationality Tim Ferriss who I can use as a model for my own development. You could nominate yourself or Eliezer for this role, but if you did so, you would have to sell that role.

I unfortunately don't have much to offer that can actually be helpful. I (and I feel like this probably applies to many LWers) am not at all turned off by arrogance, and actually find it somewhat refreshing. But this reminds me of something that a friend of mine said after I got her to read HPMOR:

"after finishing chapter 5 of hpmor I have deduced that harry is a complete smarmy shit that I want to punch in the face. no kid is that disrespectful. also he reminds me of a young voldemort....please don't tell me he actually tries taking over the world/embezzling funds/whatever"

ETA: she goes on in another comment (On Facebook), after I told her to give it to chapter 10, like EY suggests, "yeah I'm at chapter 17 and still don't really like harry (he seems a bit too much of a projection of the author perhaps? or the fact that he siriusly thinks he's the greatest thing evarrr/is a timelord) but I'm still reading for some reason?"

Seems to be the same general sentiment, to me. Not specifically the SI, but of course tangentially related. For what it's worth, I disagree. Harry's awesome. ;-)

(a) My experience with the sociology of academia has been very much in line with what Lukeprog's friend, Shminux and RolfAndreassen describe. This is the culture that I was coming from in writing my post titled Existential Risk and Public Relations. Retrospectively I realize that the modesty norm is unusually strong in academia and to that extent I was off-base in my criticism.

The modesty norms have some advantages and disadvantages. I think that it's appropriate for even the best people take the view "I'm part of a vast undertaking; if I hadn't gotten there first it's not unlikely that someone else would have gotten there within a few decades." However, I'm bothered by the fact that the norm is so strong that innocuous questions/comments which quite are weak signals of immodesty are frowned upon.

(b) I agree with cousin it that it would be good for SIAI staff to "communicate more carefully, like Holden Karnofsky or Carl Shulman."

I'm pretty sure most everyone here already knows this, but the perception of arrogance is basically a signalling/counter-signalling problem. If you boast (produce expensive signals of your own fitness), that tells people you are not too poor to have anything to boast about. But it can also signal that you have a need to brag to be noticed, which in turn can be interpreted to mean you aren't truly the best of the best. The basic question is context.

Is there a serious danger your potential contributions will be missed? If so, it is wisest to boast. Is there already an arms race of other boasts to compete with? Is boasting so cheap nobody will pay it any attention? In that case, the best strategy is to stun people with unexpected modesty. You can also save resources that way, as long as nobody interprets that as a need to save resources.

Pulling off the modesty trick can turn out to be harder than an effective boast, which is of course related to why it works. People have to receive the information that you are competent somehow -- a subtle nudge of some kind, preexisting reputation, etc. It also comes to a point of saturation, just like loud/direct boasting does, it just is harder to notice when it does.

So when someone unexpectedly acts arrogant in a niche where modesty has become commonplace, my theory is that it can actually act as a counter-counter-signal. To pull it off they would have to somehow distinguish their arrogance from that of a low-status blowhard who is only making noise because otherwise they wouldn't be noticed.

Logically extrapolating this, we might then get the more seemingly modest counter-counter-counter signaler, who is able to signal (through a supremely sophisticated mechanism) that they don't need to signal arrogance and separate themselves from modest folk who are so pretentious as to signal their modesty by keeping quiet in order to prevent themselves from being confused with blowhards who signal expensively. However, for counter(3)-signaling to be an advantage there would first need to be a significant population of counter(2)-signalers to compete against. I'm guessing this probably just sort of slides into different kinds of signal/counter-signal forms rather than going infinitely meta.

I intended [...]

But some people seem to have read it and heard this instead [...]

When I write posts, I'd often be tempted to use examples from my own life, but then I'd think:

1. Do I really just intend to use myself to illustrate some point of rationality, or do I subconsciously also want to raise my social status by pointing out my accomplishments?
2. Regardless of what I "really intend", others will probably see those examples as boasting, and there's no excuse (e.g., I couldn't any better examples) I can make to prevent that.

This usually stops me from using myself as examples, sometimes with the result that the post stays unwritten or unpublished. I'm not saying that you should do the same since you have different costs and benefits to consider (or I could well be wrong myself and shouldn't care so much about not being seen as boasting), but the fact that people interpret your posts filled with personal examples/accomplishments as being arrogant shouldn't have come as a surprise.

Another point I haven't seen brought up yet is that social conventions seem to allow organizations to be more boastful than individuals. You'd often see press releases or annual reports talking up an organization's own accomplishments, while an individual doing the same thing would be considered arrogant. So an idea to consider is that when you want to boast of some accomplishment, link it to the Institute and not to an individual.

So, I have a few questions:

1. What are the most egregious examples of SI's arrogance?

Since you explicitly ask a question phrased thus, I feel obligated to mention that last April I witnessed a certain email incident that I thought was somewhat extremely bad in some ways.

I do believe that lessons have been learned since then, though. Probably there's no need to bring the matter up again, and I only mention it since according to my ethics it's the required thing to do when asked such an explicit question as above.

(Some readers may wonder why I'm not providing details here. That's because after some thought, I for my part decided against making the incident public, since I expect it might subsequently get misrepresented to look worse than what's fair. (There might be value in showing records of the incident to new SIAI employees as an example of how not to do things, though.))

A lot of people are suggesting something like "SIAI should publish more papers", but I'm not sure anyone (including those who are making the suggestion) would actually change their behavior based on that. It sounds an awful lot like "SIAI should hire a PhD".

People tell me SI is arrogant but I don't see it myself. When you tell someone something and open it up to falsification and criticism I no longer see it as arrogance ( but I am wrong there for some reason)

In any case, what annoys me about the claims made is that its mostly based on anecdotal evidence and very little has come from research. Also as a regular guy and not a scientist or engineer I've noticed a distinct lack of any discussion of SI's viewpoints in the news.

I don't see anyone actively trying to falsify any of the claims in the sequences for example, and I think it's because you cannot really take them all that seriously.

A second problem is that there are many typos, little mistakes and (due to new experimental evidence) wrong things in the sequences and they never get updated. I'd rather see the sequences as part of a continually updated wiki-like lesson plan, where feedback is reviewed by a kind of board and they change what the texts accordingly.

The nitpicks mentioned on rationalwiki also contribute to the feeling of cultishness and arrogance:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong The part about quantum mechanics could use some extra posts, especially since EY does explain why he makes the claim when you take the whole of the sequences into account. He uses evidence from unrelated fields to prove many worlds.

EDIT: for some unknown reason people are downvoting my comment, if you downvote(d) this post or see why please tell me why so I can learn and improve future posts. Private messages are ok if you don't want to do it through a response here.

Find someplace I call myself a mathematical genius, anywhere.

(I think a lot of SIAI's "arrogance" is simply made up by people who have an instinctive alarm for "trying to accomplish goals beyond your social status" or "trying to be part of the sacred magisterium", etc., and who then invent data to fit the supposed pattern. I don't know what this alarm feels like, so it's hard to guess what sets it off.)

Hi Luke,

I think you are correct that SI has an image problem, and I agree that it's at least partially due to academic norm violations (and partially due to the personalities involved). And partially due to the fact that out of possible social organizations, SI most readily maps to a kind of secular cult, where a charismatic leader extracts a living from his followers.

If above is seen as a problem in need of correcting then some possibilities for change include:

(a) Adopting mainstream academic norms strategically. (b) Competing in the "mainstream marketplace of ideas" by writing research grant proposals.

There's the signalling problem from boasting in this culture, but should we also be taking a look at whether boasting is a custom that there are rational reasons for encouraging or dropping?

Since it's been seven months, I'm curious - how much of this, if any, has been implemented? TDT has been published, but it doesn't get too many hits outside of LessWrong/MIRI, for example.

This is the best example I've seen so far:

I actually intend to fix the universe (or at least throw some padding atop my local region of it, as disclaimed above)

The padding version seems more reasonable next to the original statement, but neither of these are very realistic goals for a person to accomplish. There is probably not a way to present grandiosity such as this without it coming across as arrogance or worse.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/uk/beyond_the_reach_of_god/nsh

I still don't get what's actually supposed to be wrong about being arrogant. In all the examples I've found of actual arrogance it seems a good and sensible reaction when justified, and in the alleged cases of it casuing bad outcomes it never actualy is the arrogance itself that does, there is just an overconfidence causing both the arrogance and bad outcome. Is this just some social tabo because it *correlates with overconfidence?

I'd be curious to see your feedback regarding the comments on this post. Do you believe that the answers to your questions were useful ? If so, what are you going to do about it (and if not, why not) ? If you have already done something, what was it, and how effective did it end up being ?

What about getting some tech/science savvy public-relations practitioners involved? Understanding and interacting effectively with the relevant publics might just be a skill worthy of dedicated consideration and more careful management.

Personally, I don't think SI is arrogant, but rather that should would harder to publish books/papers so that they would be more accepted by the general scientific (and non-scientific, even) community. Not that I think think that they aren't trying already...

Are there subjects and ways in which SI isn't arrogant enough?

Informally, let us suppose perceived arrogance in attempting a task is the perceived competence of the individual divided by the perceived difficulty of the task. SIAI is attempting an impossible task, without infinite competence. Thus, there is no way SIAI can be arrogant enough.

You asked for it so I will raise this topic yet again, I hope not to get downvoted:

In http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/

EY wrote:

I don't believe there were explosives planted in the World Trade Center. I don't believe in haunted houses. I don't believe in perpetual motion machines. I believe that all these beliefs are not only wrong but visibly insane.

I presented evidence to the contrary of that claim only to be downvoted: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/1r5v

I asked EY to explain why he thinks so only to be downvoted: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/1t7r

My 9/11 survey was also downvoted. I'm fine with people having their opinion on 9/11 but why would you prevent others from collecting objective data? http://lesswrong.com/lw/8ac/911_survey/

I think LW has a great difficulty in allowing dissenting voices.