Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence

dammit, you could have told me that before I spent so much time building this flying machine made of bone and flesh...

It's amazing how many supposedly rationalist movements fall into the trap of crippling "reverse stupidity." Many in the atheist movement would not have you make positive pronouncements, not have you form organizations, not have you advocate, not have you adopt symbols or give the movement a name, not have you educate children on atheism, and so on, all because "religion does it." I think in the case of atheism the source is unique: every (modern) atheist knows his or her atheism is a product of scientific understanding but few atheists are willing to admit it (having taken up also the false belief that some things are "outside science"), so they go looking for other reasons, and "reverse stupidity" offers such reasons in abundance.

"... you have to directly challenge the arguments of Nick Bostrom or Eliezer Yudkowsky post-2003."

Just what the heck happened in 2003? In any experimental field, particularly this one, having new insights and using them to correct old mistakes is just part of the normal flow of events. Was there a super-super-insight which corrected a super-super-old mistake?

If the same majority of smart people as stupid people are conservative then the statement that "Not all conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives." is actually completely irrelevant, but I don't think that anyone believes otherwise. If there is a positive correlation between intelligence and the truth of one's beliefs (a claim the truth of which is probably assumed by most people to be true for any definition of intelligence they care about) then the average intelligence of people who hold a given belief is entangled with the truth of that belief and can be used as Bayesian evidence. Evidence is not proof of course, and this heuristic will not be perfectly reliable.

I believe it was John Stuart Mill who said that.

Nice move using Stalin instead of Hitler, since I get tired of hearing the latter brought up. I myself have endorsed some of Stalin's ideas like "[ideology] in one country" since even if his policies were bad he was at least fairly successful in getting them implemented and lasting for a good while.

I'm with McCabe-- what was the epiphany?

every (modern) atheist knows his or her atheism is a product of scientific understanding

This is wrong.

Even presuming that you're speaking very informally, and your statement shouldn't be interpreted literally, it's STILL wrong.

"The least convenient path is the only valid one."

When arguing against and idea honestly with the strongest advocates, is it always true that what is right is not always what is easy? Does making the choice not to argue make someone wrong outright or does not entering into the argument in the first place make the point of view non-existent in some way?

Clarification: Just yudkowsky after 2003 or yudkowsky and bostrom together, perhaps sharing the same mistake? It would be usefull to know so I don't make the same mistake, et al.

Matthew: Just me after 2003, not Bostrom.

I call the experience my "Bayesian enlightenment" but that doesn't really say anything, does it? Guess you'll have to keep reading Overcoming Bias until I get there.

michael vassar: You're right when you say a correlation of intelligence with liberalism is evidence for liberalism, but that's not because the stupid people are conservative, it's because the smart people are liberal. At least I think that's what Eliezer meant.

Though you could see the conservativeness of stupid people as strengthening the evidence provided by smart liberal people because it points at there being more of a conservative human baseline to deviate from.

"""A car with a broken engine cannot drive backward at 200 mph, even if the engine is really really broken."""

Wrong!

"When the player's truck is put into reverse, the truck will accelerate infinitely; however, the truck will halt instantly when the reverse key is released."

"I call the experience my "Bayesian enlightenment" but that doesn't really say anything, does it?"

Note to readers: Eli discovered Bayesian probability theory (in general) much earlier than 2003, see http://www.singinst.org/upload/CFAI//design/clean.html#programmer_bayesbinding.

"You're right when you say a correlation of intelligence with liberalism is evidence for liberalism, but that's not because the stupid people are conservative, it's because the smart people are liberal."

If you assume the population is partitioned into liberals and conservatives, a high percentage of stupid conservatives implies a high percentage of smart liberals, and vice-versa. If smart liberals are Bayesian evidence for B, then smart conservatives must be Bayesian evidence against B (note that 'smart' here is relative to the average, not some absolute level of smartness).

Can we agree on the following: if you pick a random stupid person and ask for an opinion on B, and the stupid person says B is false, this cannot be evidence against B unless you have background knowledge on the fraction of people who think B, in which case all the work is really being done by the indirect inference about the opinions of smarter people, so calling the stupid person's opinion negative evidence is misleading even if strictly speaking correct?

Isn't the truth of a thing (such as a sentence or artwork) determined by how closely it matches reality? And the match-level is a function of the identity of reality and of the thing. So there is no mention of smart or dumb people anywhere in that.

Good post, and good job putting this into a common language framework. If you convince only one or two more people to think clearly, it was worth it! B

Steven: Yes we can, with the caveat you mentioned earlier about the human baseline. Of course, that point is plausibly precisely what Mill or whoever was pointing to with his comment.

this cannot be evidence against B unless you have background knowledge on the fraction of people who think B,

No. The "unless" clause is still incorrect. We can know a great deal about the fraction of people who think B, and it still cannot serve even as meta-evidence for or against B.

There is an ongoing confusion here about the difference between evidence and meta-evidence. It is as obvious and important as the difference between experimental analysis and meta-analysis, and it is NOT being acknowledged.

"No. The "unless" clause is still incorrect. We can know a great deal about the fraction of people who think B, and it still cannot serve even as meta-evidence for or against B."

This can't be right. I have a hundred measuring devices. Ninety are broken and give a random answer with an unknown distribution, while ten give an answer that strongly correlates with the truth. Ninety say A and ten say B. If I examine a random meter that says B and find that it is broken, then surely that has to count as strong evidence against B.

This is probably an unnecessarily subtle point, of course; the overall thrust of the argument is of course correct.

We can know a great deal about the fraction of people who think B, and it still cannot serve even as meta-evidence for or against B. There is an ongoing confusion here about the difference between evidence and meta-evidence.

No. From a Bayesian perspective, there is no difference other than strength. This is, of course, different from saying that the truth is what the authorities say it is, but I think that's what you're hearing it as.

Actually, if I'm not wrong (and it still confuses me), arguments from authority have a different conditional probability structure than "normal" arguments.

"You're right when you say a correlation of intelligence with liberalism is evidence for liberalism, but that's not because the stupid people are conservative, it's because the smart people are liberal."

That seems to me exactly wrong. A proposition's truth or falseness is not entangled in the intelligence of the people who profess the proposition. Alien cultists do not change the probability of poorly hidden aliens. Dumb people who argue for evolution over creationism do not raise the probability that Genesis is natural history, no matter how dumb they are. Conservative Proposition X will be true or not true regardless of whether it is supported by a very intelligent conservative or by a very dumb conservative.

From a Bayesian perspective, there is no difference other than strength.

That's precisely why Bayes' Theorem isn't all you need to know in order to reason. It's an immensely powerful tool, but a grossly inadequate methodology.

Again: there is a great deal of confusion about the difference between evidence and meta-evidence here.

If I do find someone whose statement seem to reliably anti-correlate with reality, am I justified in taking their making a statement as evidence that the statement is false?

Caledonian: please define meta-evidence, then, since I think Eliezer has adequately defined evidence. Clear up our confusion!

Eliezer has NOT adequately defined evidence. There is no data that isn't tied to every event through the operations of causality.

To say it abstractly: For an event to be evidence about a target of inquiry, it has to happen differently in a way that's entangled with the different possible states of the target. (To say it technically: There has to be Shannon mutual information between the evidential event and the target of inquiry, relative to your current state of uncertainty about both of them.) Entanglement can be contagious when processed correctly, which is why you need eyes and a brain. If photons reflect off your shoelaces and hit a rock, the rock won't change much. The rock won't reflect the shoelaces in any helpful way; it won't be detectably different depending on whether your shoelaces were tied or untied. This is why rocks are not useful witnesses in court. A photographic film will contract shoelace-entanglement from the incoming photons, so that the photo can itself act as evidence. If your eyes and brain work correctly, you will become tangled up with your own shoelaces.

And you haven't tried to define meta-evidence at all.

Yes Doug. Furthermore, if you can find a pair of people the difference of who's opinions seems to correlate with reality you can use that as evidence, which is the pattern pointed to by the original quote.

The definition Eliezer offered, and the way in which he used the term later, are not connected in any meaningful way. His definition is wrong.

And you haven't tried to define meta-evidence at all.

Do you know what a meta-analysis study is?

Beware of feeding trolls. If the one can offer naught but flat assertions, you may be better off saying, "Let the audience decide." If you engage and offer defense to each repeated flat assertion, you encourage them to do even less work in the future, since it offers the same attention-reward.

@yudkowsky I would be happy if I could judge the merit of Bayes for myself versus the frequentists approach. I doubt UTD faculty have seen the light, but who knows, they might. I wonder even more deeply if a thorough understanding of Bayes gives any insight into Epistemology? If you can answer Bayes does offer insight into epistemology I know for sure I will be around for many more months. If I remember correctly, we both have the same IQ (140) yet I am much worse at mathematics. OF course, my dad is an a/c technician, not a physicist.

I enjoy your hard work and insights Eliezer. Also Caledonians comments, mainly for their mystery.

Likewise, if you attempt to engage people who make foolish proclamations and ambiguous definitions, it can reward them with attention and conversation. The benefits to puncturing shoddy arguments are often greater than the prices that need to be paid to do so.

Eliezer has repeatedly offered a definition for a term, gone on to mention that this definition is incomplete, and then failed to explicitly refine the definition or provide a process for the reader to update it. Despite recognizing the fallacious nature of conclusions or arguments supported with such behavior (what he has called the "hidden advisor fallacy"), he doesn't seem to have a problem with it when he's the one using the fallacy.

Precision is an absolute requirement for deriving valid conclusions, and when using natural languages extreme care has to be taken to compensate for their ambiguity. You're not taking that care - you are in fact being extraordinarily careless.

Caledonian,

What do you mean by meta-evidence? How isMr. Yudkowsky's definition of evidence not adequate for the use in this post?

How about this for a precise definition: A is evidence about B if p(A | B) != p(A | ~B).

Of course, by this definition, almost everything is evidence about almost everything else. So we'd like to talk about the strength of evidence. A good candidate is log p(A | B) - log p(A | ~B). This is the number that gets added to your log odds for B when you observe A.

Of course, by this definition, almost everything is evidence about almost everything else.

Ding ding ding!

It may even be the case that, by that definition, everything is evidence about everything else. And clearly that doesn't match our everyday understanding and use of the term - it doesn't even match our formal understanding and use of the term.

What's missing from the definition that we need, in order to make the definition match our understanding?

But everything is evidence about everything else. I don't see the problem at all.

But everything is evidence about everything else. I don't see the problem at all.

Given the circumference of Jupiter around its equator, the height of the Statue of Liberty, and the price of tea in China, can you tell me what's sitting atop my computer monitor right now?

If so, what is it?

If not, why not? I gave you plenty of evidence.

Steven, I reduxified your argument as Argument Screens Off Authority.

If not, why not? I gave you plenty of evidence.

Caledonian, you gave evidence, but you certainly didn't give plenty of it. I see you ignored the part of my post where I talked about how to quantify evidence. The important question isn't whether or not we have evidence; it's how much evidence we have.

Let me make an analogy. I can define sugar as sucrose; a specific carbohydrate whose molecular structure you can view on wikipedia. I might say that a substance is "sugary" if it contains some sugar. But by this definition, almost everything is sugary, so I hasten to point out that the important question is how sugary it is, and we might define this as the fraction of its mass which consists of sugar.

If, after I have pointed this out, you offer me some sugar cookies containing 1 molecule of sucrose, and then defend yourself by saying that according to my definition, they are indeed sugary, you are being obnoxious. I already told you how to quantify sugariness, and you ignored it for rhetorical reasons.

Evidence is like gravity. Everything is pulling on everything else, but in most cases the pull is weak enough that we can pretty much ignore it. What you have done, Caledonian, is akin to telling me the position of three one-gram weights, and then asking me to calculate the motion of Charon based on that.

If, after I have pointed this out, you offer me some sugar cookies containing 1 molecule of sucrose, and then defend yourself by saying that according to my definition, they are indeed sugary, you are being obnoxious. I already told you how to quantify sugariness, and you ignored it for rhetorical reasons.

No, I'm not being obnoxious. I'm pointing out that your definition is bad by showing that it leads directly to common and absurd conclusions.

By Eliezer's definition, even the thing he offers as an example of a thing that isn't evidence IS STILL EVIDENCE. And instead of you recognizing that this means something is deeply wrong with the definition, you try to exploit the ambiguity of language to defend the utterly absurd result.

Everything is pulling on everything else, but in most cases the pull is weak enough that we can pretty much ignore it. What you have done, Caledonian, is akin to telling me the position of three one-gram weights, and then asking me to calculate the motion of Charon based on that.

So close... and yet, so far.

I agree with you that, even if I gave you absolute, complete, and utterly precise data on the three weights, there is no way you could derive the motion of Charon from that.

So: are the three weights evidence of Charon's movement?

For any that may be genuinely confused: If you read What is Evidence?, An Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning, and A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation, you will understand how to define evidence both qualitatively and quantitatively.

For the rest of you: Stop feeding the troll.

Caledonian is just trying to point out that the keys to rationalism are family values and a literal interpretation of the Bible. I don't know why you all can't see something so obvious.

Observe:

"It may even be the case that, by that definition, everything is evidence about everything else. And clearly that doesn't match our everyday understanding and use of the term - it doesn't even match our formal understanding and use of the term.

What's missing from the definition that we need, in order to make the definition match our understanding?"

Jesus.

"Given the circumference of Jupiter around its equator, the height of the Statue of Liberty, and the price of tea in China, can you tell me what's sitting atop my computer monitor right now?"

Jesus.

"Do you know what a meta-analysis study is?"

Jesus.

The Bible has the answers, people. This is just further proof that until the 'rationalist' community incorporates insights from the Intelligent Design movement and other members of the irrational community, no further progress can be made in understanding the movement of Charon or whatever. Keep the faith Caledonian. You're a warrior of God.

If this is the same Caledonian who used to post to the Pharyngula blog, he's barred from there now with good reason.

Is there a cognitive bias at work that makes it hard for people not to feed trolls?

Is there a mathematical expression in probability for the notion that unless someone is making a special effort (concerted or otherwise) they can't be any 'wronger' than 50% accuracy? Subsequently betting the other way would be generating evidence from nothing - creating information. Why no mention of thermodynamics in this post & thread?

Not to feed the troll or anything, but yes, the masses and positions of the three weights are evidence about Charon's movement. Why? Because if you calculated Charon's orbit without knowing their masses, positions etc, you'd be less accurate than if you did. Fact! (Note evidence ABOUT. Evidence OF Charon's movement is taken care of with a decent telescope!)

Eliezer, in your opinion, do the historical prevalence of organised religion, and the human tendency to faith in the unknowable/unprovable, have any bearing at all on the likelihood of the existence of a supreme being of some description?

Not to feed the troll or anything, but yes, the masses and positions of the three weights are evidence about Charon's movement. Why? Because if you calculated Charon's orbit without knowing their masses, positions etc, you'd be less accurate than if you did.

Calculating Charon's orbit without knowing what direction Charon moves in, or even whether it moves at all, is an impossible task. You are substituting "Charon's orbit" for "Charon's movement" in your argument, then acting as though you have made a statement about Charon's movement.

If you all do not grasp why precision in the use of words is absolutely necessary to eliminate bias in natural language, I will drop the point; nevertheless, it remains.

Ben Jones, I don't see the human existence of religion as having any evidential bearing on the existence of a Super Happy Agent sufficiently like a person and unlike evolution that theists would actually notice its existence. Pretty much the same probability as an object one foot across and composed of chocolate cake existing in the asteroid belt. For interventionist Super Happy Agents, same probability as elves stealing your socks.

Incidentally, with sufficiently precise measurements it's perfectly possible to get a gravitational map of the entire Solar System off a random household object.

Ben Jones, I don't see the human existence of religion as having any evidential bearing on the existence of a Super Happy Agent sufficiently like a person and unlike evolution that theists would actually notice its existence.

Any evidential bearing? Surely P(religion X exists|religion X is true) is higher than P(religion X exists|religion X is false).

Nick, I don't see how that follows for the supermajority of religions that are logically self-contradictory, except in the sense that if 1=2 then the probability of the Sun rising tomorrow is nearly 200%. Furthermore, Ben Jones asked about religion in general rather than any specific religion, and religion in general most certainly cannot be true.

In general, any claim maintained by even a single human being to be true will be more probable, simply based on the authority of that human being, than some random claim such as the chocolate cake claim, which is not believed by anyone.

There are possibly some exceptions to this (and possibly not), but in general there is no particular reason to include religions as exceptions.

Incidentally, with sufficiently precise measurements it's perfectly possible to get a gravitational map of the entire Solar System off a random household object.

Also incorrect. More than one configuration of masses can have exactly the same effect on the object. No matter how precisely you measure the properties of the object, you can never distinguish between those configurations.

I should add that this is true about self-contradictory religions as well. For the probability that I mistakenly interpret the religion to be self-contradictory is greater than the probability that the chocolate cake is out there.

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."

Nick: Why should an atheistic rationalist have any more faith a a religion that exists than a religion that doesn't? I don't belive in God; the testimony of a man that claims he spoke to God in a burning bush doesn't sway me to update my probability. I Defy The Data!

My 'lack of faith' stems from a probability-based judgment that there is no Super Agent. With this as my starting point, I have as much reason to worship Yoda as I do God.

Ben Jones, I don't see the human existence of religion as having any evidential bearing on the existence of a Super Happy Agent sufficiently like a person and unlike evolution that theists would actually notice its existence. Pretty much the same probability as an object one foot across and composed of chocolate cake existing in the asteroid belt. For interventionist Super Happy Agents, same probability as elves stealing your socks.

Eli, you're just saying that you don't believe in the existence of a SHASLAPAUETTWANIE. But since you labeled it with: "...that theists would actually notice its existence," then clearly the existence of religion has some evidential bearing on the existence of a SHASLAPAUETTWANIE.

Eli, you're just saying that you don't believe in the existence of a SHASLAPAUETTWANIE. But since you labeled it with: "...that theists would actually notice its existence," then clearly the existence of religion has some evidential bearing on the existence of a SHASLAPAUETTWANIE.

(Blink.)

Um, I concede to your crushing logic, I guess... what exactly am I conceding again?

Flying saucer cultism was helped along by secret Cold War technological advances that were accidentally witnessed by civilians.

For example, the famous 1947 Roswell incident was the crashing of an American strategic reconnaissance super-balloon that was supposed to float over the Soviet Union and snap pictures, which would then be recovered many thousands of miles away. That's why it was made out of the latest high-tech materials that were unfamiliar to people in small town New Mexico in 1947.

The KGB used to generate flying saucer stories in Latin America to discredit actual sightings of the re-entry of a Soviet "partial-orbit" missile that was being tested in order to allow a surprise attack on the U.S. from the South (the NORAD radar assumed a Soviet attack would come over the Arctic). KGB agents in Latin America would phone in flying saucer reports to newspapers to make honest witnesses of the Soviet missile test look like lunatics.

Steve, maybe this was your point anyway, but the incidents you mention indicate that the existence of flying saucer cults is evidence for the existence of aliens (namely by showing that the cults were based on seeing something in the real world.) No doubt they aren't much evidence, especially given the prior improbability, but they are certainly evidence.

"Not all Conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are
Conservatives." (The British Conservative Party was the brunt of this quip by J.S. Mills.) It helps to Venn diagram this. I find that many stupid conservatives assume that conservatives are the majority, which leaves few stupid people to be liberals or anything else (although a majority of Liberals are assumed by stupid conservatives to be stupid people). But if conservatives are not a majority, there are many stupid people who MIGHT or MIGHT NOT be liberals. I assume there are plenty of stupid people to go around between the conservatives, liberals and other groups. If conservatives ARE the majority and most stupid people are conservatives, but liberals are a very sizeable minority, you would expect a lot of Smart People Who Are liberals. To quote Karl Rove: "As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing." Presumably the Republicans have a lock on the rich and stupid vote, or at least the rich and uneducated.

pokes head in and looks around Okay, I'm new here, and maybe I shouldn't open by poking a sleeping dragon, but I can't help but try and take a small crack at this. firm nod

As I understand it, the crux of the article is concern about irrational arguments which imply that valid points and rational arguments should be discarded if they are somehow associated with irrational, unsuccessful, or commonly disliked people. Many of the comments on the conservatives quote seem to ignore that context.

Also, debating the semantics of the article rather than its core meaning (Whether or not the word "evidence" should be used to describe such, for example) is counterproductive, distracting and not really assisting people in learning rational thought.

That said, I feel that even out of context the point is still valid. One major and somewhat flawed assumption in many of the comments here as well as consistently elsewhere is that smart people are more likely to arrive at the "correct" answer than stupid people.

Stupid people often arrive at the correct conclusion, either by luck, or because a question isn't actually very difficult, or because they may listen to the advice of others.

Smart people often arrive at the incorrect conclusion, as they do not (and can not) always gather enough evidence to make a sufficiently informed decision, and sometimes take false advice or evidence under consideration.

Both smart and stupid people can and will often lie about their findings for many reasons, or they may disagree over what defines the correct conclusion.

Such associative statements are therefore so weakly weighted as evidence that they are only really worth mentioning if no other evidence can be found, and an argument which relies solely on such weak data as this is not to be trusted as truth.

At best, it may serve as a cautious guess until more reliable evidence can be found, which would quickly render the opinions of unreliable people (be they stupid or smart) obsolete.

In the Charon's orbit example, this would be less like using small weights in a room (Which is very fine, very precise evidence), and more like trying to track Charon's movement using blurry pictures taken at random across the entire night sky. If some of them had inaccurate timestamps.

In Hansonian terms: Your instinctive willingness to believe something will change along with your willingness to affiliate with people who are known for believing it - quite apart from whether the belief is actually true.

And that's why politics is more about identity than predictive truth.

Many people are unsatisfied with their monogamous relationships, therefore polyamory must be great?

I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?

-Ted Kaczynski, The Unabomber

-Heartland Institute billboard

From the press release:

1. Who appears on the billboards?

The billboard series features Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber; Charles Manson, a mass murderer; and Fidel Castro, a tyrant. Other global warming alarmists who may appear on future billboards include Osama bin Laden and James J. Lee (who took hostages inside the headquarters of the Discovery Channel in 2010).

These rogues and villains were chosen because they made public statements about how man-made global warming is a crisis and how mankind must take immediate and drastic actions to stop it.

2. Why did Heartland choose to feature these people on its billboards?

Because what these murderers and madmen have said differs very little from what spokespersons for the United Nations, journalists for the “mainstream” media, and liberal politicians say about global warming. They are so similar, in fact, that a Web site has a quiz that asks if you can tell the difference between what Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, wrote in his “Manifesto” and what Al Gore wrote in his book, Earth in the Balance.

The point is that believing in global warming is not “mainstream,” smart, or sophisticated. In fact, it is just the opposite of those things. Still believing in man-made global warming – after all the scientific discoveries and revelations that point against this theory – is more than a little nutty. In fact, some really crazy people use it to justify immoral and frightening behavior.

Interestingly, science is the first thing mentioned in the next section:

3. Why shouldn’t I still believe in global warming?

Because the best available science says about two-thirds of the warming in the 1990s was due to natural causes, not human activities; the warming trend of the second half of the twentieth century century already has stopped and forecasts of future warming are unreliable; and the benefits of a moderate warming are likely to outweigh the costs. Global warming, in other words, is not a crisis.

Again, I disagree. Cults can't form around anything. They can only form around issues that would make them social or intellectual outcasts. And in a world in which there were poorly hidden aliens, too many intelligent people would be of the opinion that there are poorly hidden aliens, and no such cult could arise.

But the more important point is... IF I start to think that there are poorly hidden aliens, that could be due to one of two reasons: either because I have reasonable evidence for their existence, or because I'm being influenced by some sort of bias.

The existence of cults around the issue shows that those biases exist and are reasonably common, and thus are a more likely reason for my belief than the alternative of actual aliens.

It's not much evidence one way or the other.

I'd guess P(cults|aliens) would be noticeably bigger than P(cults|~aliens).

It's just that the prior P(aliens) is so tiny that even the posterior P(aliens|cults) is negligible.

That's one way to put it, I guess.

I think that this has deal with boundeed rationality. Perfect knowledge required endless ammount of time- and all human have only limited lifetime. So, ammount of time for each dessision limited even more. Therefore we can not explore all argument. And I think - it would be a good strategy to throw away some arguments right in the begining and don't waste time on them. Instead you can pay more attention to more plausible one. And this give you a opportunity to build a relatively accurate model of the world in relativly short time. If you not agree- consider this argument. How you can argue against communism if you don't read all the works of Marx/Engels/Lenin/Mao/Trotskiy/Rosa Luxemburg/Bucharin/Zinovev/Stalin/Kautskiy/Sen-Simon....And so on- liste can be endless. I think that such arguments are actually used as a demand that you must slavishly agree with persone who said this. Clearly, this unacceptable and we have right don't agree even if we doesn't read all this volumes- using only limited ammount of data that we already posses. So. if we throw away some idea after first glance- stupidity of followers is not a worst criteria for doing this

"The conditional probability P(cults|aliens) isn’t less than P(cults|aliens) "

Shouldn't this be " The conditional probability P(cults|~aliens) isn’t less than P(cults|aliens) ?" It seems trivial that a probability is not less than itself, and the preceding text seems to propose the modified version included in this comment.

I'm reserved as to the corollary that only winning against the strongest advocate of an idea holds ANY meaning to disprove the idea.

For one, there could be a better arguer. If there is a better advocate of the intelligence explosion than Eliezer, unlikely as they may seem, who just won't go public and keeps to private circles, would it do nothing to win against the former? Taken another step further, if it is likely there ever will be such a proponent, does that invalidate all present and past efforts?

For another, the quality of an arguer can only be made after they effect. So to have any standing on any idea, one must win against every single advocate of the opposing view. Has anyone here tried that on, say, theism?

I think it's more accurate to say that winning an argument against sub-optimal advocates of an idea doesn't give enough basis to discredit the idea reliably. Indeed, since in complicated issues there is often no advocate who can exhibit all arguments favoring a position, one cannot completely discredit the idea even after defeating the champion of advocates. This frame seems more Bayesian Rationalistic, too, as it does not deal with probabilities of 0 or 1.

One point Hans Rosling tried to convey constantly in Factfulness is that most stupid people perform significantly worse than random (than "the chimps" as he portrayed it). He argued that this results from biases etc. If this generalises to more than people's perception of how the world is doing and increases in strength for less intelligent people or people with more exposition to mass media, this could potentially apply to silliness and alien intervention not being orthogonal but having significant correlation as well. Similarly, "most stupid people vote republican" is then at least some mild evidence that this party actually is more "wrong" (although I think this is weaker for a two-party system like the US, and stronger for European multiparty systems: If a party's actions correlate with the preferences of stupid people (and those perform worse than random), that's some evidence that they're wrong and thus at least mildly relevant to a political debate.

I actually think it is possible for someone's beliefs to anti-correlate with reality without being smart enough to know what really is true just to reverse it. I can think of at least three ways this could happen, beyond extremely unlikely coincidences. The first two are that a person could be systematically deceived by someone else, until they have more false beliefs then true ones, and the second is that systematic cognitive biases could reliably distort their beliefs. The third is the most interesting one, though: If someone has a belief that many of their other beliefs depend on, and that belief is wrong, it could lead to all of those other beliefs being wrong as well. There are plenty of people who base a large portion of their beliefs on a single belief or cluster of beliefs, the most obvious example being the devoutly religious, especially if they belong to a cult or fundamentalist group. Basically, since beliefs are not independent, people can have large sets of connected beliefs that stand or fall together. Of course, this still wouldn't affect the probability that any of their beliefs not connected to those clusters are true, so it doesn't really change the conclusion of this essay by much, but I think it is interesting nonetheless. At the very least, it is a warning against having too many beliefs that all depend on a single idea.

At least for me and therefore possibly others it would be useful to put a hyperlink on an Important Name to go off to a review of their primary argument. For instance "Hanson". Wonderful writeup.

Thanks.