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Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

Take a shot anytime a “rationalist” invokes Bayes.

Long article for him to basically say nothing insightful.

Crazy people will say seemingly true things that attract more crazy people.

OK. Thanks I guess.

The two paragraphs about how good at arguments he is and how other educated people might be able to out argue him in topics if they’re specialists _maybe_ was so stupid I closed the tab, but then I decided to be adult and read the rest to see if there was anything redeeming.

There wasn’t. Don’t bother.

Why do people read this guy’s crap? Did he not bother to share this with a trusted friend first to see if he sounded like an idiot?

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This is strangely reductive. The article isn’t very well written but I think the key point is insightful.

The article was written in 2019, so before COVID, which was very prescient. During the pandemic the only really reasonable option was to follow CDC guidelines even though they seemed to be unreasonable, constantly changing, and even sometimes conflicting. There were large parts of the population that were smart enough to realize something odd was going on, and so they searched for their own answers, and sometimes the ones they came up with were pretty bad. Obviously we would like to do something about this, but what? What do you think should be done?

I noticed this too. People that casually drop "Bayesian priors" into conversation seems to be a strong signal for someone who's up their own arse. Sam Bankman-Fried did it a lot.

Well I thought the offhand remark about Bayesian priors was actually the real answer to his question of why we don’t accept arguments. I’m not going to accept some argument that contradicts a lot of what I previously thought was true unless it is very convincing (that can be achieved in a variety of ways). The remark about Bayes should have been front and center.

It's a shibboleth for the Rationalist community, that's why.

> Why do people read this guy’s crap?

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that it's because they disagree with your assessment, and think that he does have something insightful to say.

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