Re: My view of recent events

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Aug 31 2006 - 14:24:33 MDT


Damien Broderick wrote:
> At 10:58 AM 8/31/2006 -0700, Eliezer wrote:
>
>> What actually triggered Loosemore's [expulsion from SL4], please
>> note, was when he started claiming expertise in the field of
>> heuristics and biases.
>
> More extreme and toxic binary oppositions. My reading was that
> Richard claimed *familiarity* with h&b literature such as JuU,
> certainly as part of his postgraduate studies 20 years ago if not
> more recently, not *expertise* of the kind claimable by, say, a
> professor of the topic.

There were a lot of messages flying back and forth; possibly you missed
this part, or didn't attribute to it the same significance I did,
causing it to be fixed in memory.

Loosemore wrote:
>
> This is important, because I *knew* this perfectly well when I wrote
> what I wrote: I knew it because I am a cognitive scientist steeped
> in the experimental and theoretical results of this field, and I have
> known it for a long time. When I wrote my words in that first
> message, I was generous enough to give Eliezer credit for also
> knowing the field, and so I did not hand-hold him through all the
> tedious details, assuming that he was smart enough to know them
> already.

Now, there have been a *lot* of messages flying back and forth. And
maybe people have lost track. I doubt that my own mind is tracking
everything successfully. And maybe it feels tempting to stand above the
fray and decide that both sides are at fault. But this particular
statement above stands as a definite, verifiable, major untruth; whether
arrived at through actual dishonesty, or through extreme self-deception.
  Again, this may be publicly verified by anyone who has read e.g.
"Judgment Under Uncertainty", and who reads the above statement of
Loosemore alongside his original post "The Conjunction Fallacy Fallacy".

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence


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