[lechatonnoir]

> They don't really ever show a sense of "hey, I've got a thought, maybe I haven't considered all angles to it, maybe I'm wrong - but here it is". The type of people that would be embarrassed to not have an opinion on a topic or say "I don't know"

edit: my apologies, that was someone else in the thread. I do feel like between the two comments though there is a "damned if you do, damned if you don't". (The original quote above I found absurd upon reading it.)

[reducesuffering]

Haha my thoughts exactly. This HN thread is simultaneously criticizing them for being too assured, not considering other possibilities, and hedging that they may not be right and other plausibilities exist.

“Damned if you do” indeed…

[sanderjd]

> "damned if you do, damned if you don't"

This is right, but doesn't actually cover all the options. It's damned if you [write confidently about something and] do or don't [hedge with a probability or "epistemic status"].

But the other option, which is the one the vast majority of people choose, is to not write confidently about everything.

It's fine, there are far worse sins than writing persuasively about tons of stuff and inevitably getting lots of it wrong. But it's absolutely reasonable to criticize this choice, irregardless of the level of hedging.

[lechatonnoir]

Well, on a meta level, I think their community has decided that in general it's better to post (and subsequently be able to discuss) ideas that one is not yet very confident about, and ideally that's what the "epistemic status" markers are supposed to indicate to the reader.

They can't really be blamed for the fact that others go on to take the ideas more seriously than they intended.

(If anything, I think that at least in person, most rationalists are far less confident and far less persuasive than the typical person in proportion to the amount of knowledge/expertise/effort they have on a given topic, particularly in a professional setting, and they would all be well-served to do at least a normal human amount of "write and explain persuasively rather than as a mechanical report of the facts as you see them".)

(Also, with all communities there will be the more serious and dedicated core of the people, and then those who sort of cargo-cult or who defer much, or at least some, of their thinking to members with more status. This is sort of unavoidable on multiple levels-- for one, it's quite a reasonable thing to do with the amount of information out there, and for another, communities are always comprised of people with varying levels of seriousness, sincere people and grifters, careful thinkers and less careful thinkers, etc. (see mobs-geeks-sociopaths))

(Obviously even with these caveats there are exceptions to this statement, because society is complex and something about propaganda and consequentialism.)

Alternately, I wonder if you think there might be a better way of "writing unconfidently", like, other than not writing at all.