Oddbean

If you don't use an all-time cherry picked example and pick the best young player in hockey (feel free to use baseball or basketball or w/e) and then ask, if you delete 99% of the competition, would that player have been the best in the world at 16, the answer is generally "no, and it's not even close" I don't expect someone who doesn't follow sports to know this, but I find cultures where people love this kind of "clever" reasoning, totally disconnected from any knowledge of reality, quite odd

As an aside, a reason I find the rationality community interesting is that they nominally respect the epistemic values I strive for, but they generally embody the opposite and are wildly overconfident (ofc. there are exceptions) I remember reading the pre-LW stuff and thinking "oh, cool. Other people who are trying to mitigate the impact of cognitive biases on their own thinking" and then "weird. These people are super overconfident about things they know nothing about, especially the leaders"

E.g., see the following, from one of the top rationality celebs, who suggests that the rationality community should run Twitter and suggests as CEO someone they praise for having great epistemic hygiene. The praised person is the programmer who wrote the most technically ignorant/overconfident take on Twitter infra I saw: https://mastodon.social/@danluu/109374630690202023. (BTW, not a cherry picked example in any dim. The #2 worst take was from another rationality person, person above is generally overconfident, etc.) https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/161/416/992/184/846/original/548fb35af19d788a.png https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/161/417/280/084/093/original/5ecdf852bba6f248.png https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/161/431/401/208/898/original/2955765f65b93182.png

@ed709062 I was lucky to be raised in a non-religious/atheist community and retroactively lucky to have first-hand perspective on the toxicity of such communities. The Hitchens, Dawkins, and Rationalist communities all set off similar alarms. I haven't cared enough about the communities to dig deep and figure out a cause.

@269a2baa Yeah, when I was younger, I noticed this about the capital-A Atheist community as well as the objectivist community. There's something about communities that are really "about" doing superior reasoning (as opposed to communities where good reasoning is important or instrumental, but aren't "about" that) that seems to cause something bad to happen. I wonder if Mensa is like this, but I haven't had enough contact with admitted Mensa folks to know.

@ed709062 The "delete 99%" phrasing is not clear. Does it mean anything like "For any year and physical sport, the top young player wasn't in the top 100 back when they were 16."? Also is there a well defined meaning for "young" in sports?