They're responsible for funneling huge amounts of funding away from domain experts (effective altruism in practice means "Oxford math PhD writes a book report about a social sciences problem they've only read about and then defunds all the NGOs").
They're responsible for moving all the AI safety funding away from disparate impact measures to "save us from skynet" fantasies.
When big money got involved, the tone shifted a lot. One phrase that really stuck with me is "exceptional talent". Everyone in EA was suddenly talking about finding, involving, hiring exceptional talent at a time where there was more than enough money going around to give some to us mediocre people as well.
In the case of EA in particular circlejerks lead to idiotic ideas even when paired with rationalist rhetoric, so they bought mansions for team building (how else are you getting exceptional talent), praised crypto (because they are funding the best and brightest) and started caring a lot about shrimp welfare (no one else does).
I think that sentence would be a fair description of certain individuals in the EA community, especially SBF, but that is not the same thing as saying that rationalists don't ever express epistemic uncertainty, when on average they spend more words on that than just about any other group I can think of.
Ah. I guess they are working out ecology through first principles, I guess?
I feel like a lot of the criticism of EA and rationalism does boil down to some kind of general criticism of naivete and entitlement, which... is probably true when applied to lots of people, regardless of whether they espouse these ideas or not.
It's also easier to criticize obviously doomed/misguided efforts at making the world a better place than to think deeply about how many of the pressing modern day problems (environmental issues, extinction, human suffering, etc.) also seem to be completely intractable, when analyzed in terms of the average individual's ability to take action. I think some criticism of EA or rationalism is also a reaction to a creeping unspoken consensus that "things are only going to get worse" in the future.
I think it's that combined with the EA approach to it which is: let's focus on space flight and shrimp welfare. Not sure which side is more in denial about the impending future?
I have no belief any particular individual can do anything about shrimp welfare more than they can about the intractable problems we do face.
I think its a result of its complete denial of and ignorance of politics. Because rationalist and effective altruist movements make a whole lot more sense, if you realize they are talking about deeply social and political issues with all politics removed from it. Its technocrat-ism the poster child of the kind of "there is no alternative" neoliberalism that everyone in the western world was indoctrinated into since the 80s.
Its a fundamental contradiction, we don't need to talk about politics because we already know liberal democracies and free-market capitalism is the best we ever going to achieve, faced with the numerous intractable problems we face that can not possibly be related to liberal democracies and free-market capitalism.
The problem is: How do we talk about any issue the world is facing today without ever challenging or even talking about any of the many assumptions the western liberal democracies are based upon? In other words: the problems we face are structural/systemic, but we are not allowed to talk about the structures/systems. That's how you end up with space flight and shrimp welfare and AGI/ASI catastrophizing taking up 99% of everything these people talk about. It's infantile, impotent liberal escapism more than anything else.
They bought one mansion to host fundraisers with the super-rich, which I believe is an important correction. You might disagree with that reasoning as well, but it's definitely not as described.
As far as I know it's never hosted an impress-the-oligarch fundraiser, which as you say would at least have a logic behind it[1] even if it might seem distasteful.
For a philosophy which started out from the point of view that much of mainstream aid was spent with little thought, it was a bit of an end of Animal Farm moment.
(to their credit, a lot of people who identified as EAs were unhappy. If you drew a Venn diagram of the people that objected, people who sneered at the objections[2] and people who identified as rationalists you might only need two circles though...)
[1]a pretty shaky one considering how easy it is to impress American billionaires with Oxford architecture without going to the expense of operating a nearby mansion as a venue, particularly if you happen to be a charitable movement with strong links to the university... [2]obviously people are only objecting to it for PR purposes because they're no smart enough to realise that capital appreciates and that venues cost money, and definitely not because they've got a pretty good idea how expensive upkeep on little used medieval venues are and how many alternatives exist if you really care about the cost effectiveness of your retreat, especially to charitable movements affiliated with a university...
>As far as I know it's never hosted an impress-the-oligarch fundraiser
As far as I know, they only hosted 3 events there before deciding to sell, so this is low-information.
I’m a bit confused by this one.
Are you saying that no-one who identifies as rationalist sneered at the objections? Because I don’t think that’s true.
Yes! It can be true both that rationalists tend, more than almost any other group, to admit and try to take account of their uncertainty about things they say and that it's fun to dunk on them for being arrogant and always assuming they're 100% right!
Because they we doing so many workshops that buying a building was cheaper than renting all the time.
You may argue that organizing workshops is wrong (and you might be right about that), but once you choose to do them, it makes sense to choose the cheaper option rather than the more expensive one. That's not rationalist rhetoric, that's just basic economy.
And I have definitely encountered "if you just listen to me properly you will understand that I am right, because I have derived my conclusions rationally" in in person interactions.
On the balance I'd rather have some arrogance and willingness to be debated and be wrong, over a timid need to defer to centuries of established thought though. The people I've met in person I've always been happy to hang out with and talk to.
I remember as a child coming to the same "if reality is a deception, at least I must exist to be deceived" conclusion that Descartes did, well before I had heard of Descartes. (I don't think this makes me special, it's just a natural conclusion anyone will reach if they ponder the subject). I think it's harmless for me to discuss that idea in public without someone saying "you need to read Descartes before you can talk about this".
I also find my personal ethics are stronly aligned with what Kant espoused. But most people I talk to are not academic philosophers and have not read Kant, so when I want to explain my morals, I am better off explaining the ideas themselves than talking about Kant, which would be a distraction anyway because I didn't learn them from Kant, we just arrived at the same conclusions. If I'm talking with a philosopher I can just say "I'm a Kantian" as shorthand, but that's really just jargon for people who already know what I'm talking about.
I also think that while it would be unusual for someone to (for example) write a guide to understanding relativity without once mentioning Einstein, it also wouldn't be a fundamental flaw.
(But I agree there's no certainly excuse for someone asserting that they're right because they're rational!)
The problem is less clear in philosophy than mathematics, but it's still there. It's really easy on your own terms to come up with some idea that the collective intelligence has already revealed to be fatally flawed in some undeniable manner, or at the very least, has very powerful arguments against it that an individual may never consider. The ideas that have survived decades, centuries, and even millenia against the collective weight of humanity assaulting them are going to have a certain character that "something someone came up with last week" will lack.
(That said I am quite heterodox in one way, which is that I'm not a big believer in reading primary sources, at least routinely. Personally I think that a lot of the primary sources noticeably lack the refinement and polish added as humanity chews it over and processes it and I prefer mostly pulling from the result of the process, and not from the one person who happened to introduce a particular idea. Such a source may be interesting for other reasons, but not in my opinion for philosophy.)
I'm not sure if this counterpoint generalizes entirely to the original critique, since certainly LessWrongers aren't usually posting about or discussing math as if they've discovered it-- usually substantially more niche topics.
Like mathematical logic (in the intersection of math and philosophy) didn't have that many true predecessors and was developed very far by maybe only 5-10 individuals cumulatively, or information theory was basically established by Claude Shannon and maybe two other guys, or various aspects of convex optimization or Fourier analysis were only developed in the 80s or so, it stands to reason that the AI-related applications of various aspects of philosophy are ripe to be developed now. (By contrast, we don't see, as much, people on LW trying to redo linear algebra from the ground up, nor more "mature" aspects of philosophy.)
(If anything, I think it's more feasible than ever before, also, for a bunch of relative amateurs to non-professionally make real intellectual contributions, like noticeably moreso than 100 or even 20 years ago. That's what increasing the baseline levels of education/wealth/exposure to information was intended to achieve, on some level, isn't it?)
I come from a physics background. We used to (and still) have a ton of physicists who decide to dable in a new field, secure in their knowledge that they are smarter than the people doing it, and that anything worthwhile that has already been thought of they can just rederive ad hoc when needed (economists are the only other group that seems to have this tendency...) [1]. It turned out every time that the people who had spent decades working on, studying, discussing and debating the field in question had actually figured important shit out along the way. They might not have come with the mathematical toolbox that physicists had, and outside perspectives that challenge established thinking to prove itself again can be valuable, but when your goal is to actually understand what's happening in the real world, you can't ignore what's been done.
[1] There even is an xkcd about this:
Suppose a foot race. Choose two runners of equal aptitude and finite existence. Start one at mile 1 and one at mile 100. Who do you think will get farther?
Not to mention, engaging in human community and discourse is a big part of what it means to be human. Knowledge isn't personal or isolated, we build it together. The "first principles people" understand this to the extent that they have even built their own community of like minded explorers, problem is, a big part of this bond is their choice to be willfully ignorant of large swaths of human intellectual development. Not only is this stupid, it also is a great disservice to your forebears, who worked just as hard to come to their conclusions and who have been building up the edifice of science bit by bit. It's completely antithetical to the spirit of scientific endeavor.
Or because western culture reflects this theme continuously through all the culture and media you've immersed in since you were a child?
Also the idea is definitely not new to Descartes, you can find echoes of it going back to Plato, so your idea isn't wrong per se. But I think it underrates the effect to which our philosophical preconceptions are culturally constructed.
All serious works in philosophy (Kant especially) are subject to interpretation. Whole research programmes exist around the works of major philosophers, interpreting and building on their works.
One cannot really do justice to e.g. the Critique of Pure Reason by discussing it based on a high level summary of the “main ideas” contained in it. These works have had a major impact on the history of Western philosophy and were groundbreaking at the time (and still are).
I find a lot of people in software have an insufferable tendency to simply ignore entire bodies of prior art, prior research, etc. outside of maybe computer science (and even that can be rare), and yet they act as though they are the most studied participants in the subject, proudly proclaiming their "genius insights" that are essentially restatements of basic facts in any given field that they would have learned if they just bothered to, you know, actually do research and put aside their egos for half a second to wonder if maybe the eons of human activity prior to their precious existence might have led to some decent knowledge.
This is a feature, not a bug, for writers who hold an opinion on something and want to rationalize it.
So many of the rationalist posts I've read through the years come from someone who has an opinion or gut feeling about something, but they want it to be seen as something more rigorous. The "first principles" writing style is a license to throw out the existing research on the topic, including contradictory evidence, and construct an all new scaffold around their opinion that makes it look more valid.
I use the "SlimeTimeMoldTime - A Chemical Hunger" blog series as an example because it was so widely shared and endorsed in the rationalist community: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p... It even received a financial grant from Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten
Actual experts were discrediting the series from the first blog post and explaining all of the author's errors, but the community soldiered on with it anyway, eventually making the belief that lithium in the water supply was causing the obesity epidemic into a meme within the rationalist community. There's no evidence supporting this and countless take-downs of how the author misinterpreted or cherry-picked data, but because it was written with the rationalist style and given the implicit blessing of a rationalist figurehead it was adopted as ground truth by many for years. People have been waking up to issues with the series for a while now, but at the time it was remarkable how quickly the idea spread as if it was a true, novel discovery.
I think that SlimeMoldTimeMold's rise and fall was actually a pretty big point in favor of the "rationalist community".
That feels like revisionist history to me. It rose to fame in LessWrong and SlateStarCodex, was promoted by Yudkowski, and proliferated for about a year and half before the takedowns finally got traction.
While it was the topic du jour in the rationalist spaces it was very difficult to argue against. I vividly remember how hard it was to convince anyone that SMTM wasn't a good source at the time, because so many people saw Yudkowski endorse it, saw Scott Alexander give it a shout out, and so on.
Now Yudkowski has gone back and edited his old endorsement, it has disappeared from the discourse, and many want to pretend the whole episode never happened.
> (I don't remember any detailed takedowns of SlimeMoldTimeMold coming before that article, but maybe there are).
Exactly my point. It was criticized widely outside of the rationalist community, but the takedowns were all dismissed because they weren't properly rationalist-coded. It finally took someone writing it up in the form of rationalist rhetoric and seeding it into LessWrong to break the spell.
This is the trend with rationalist-centric contrarianism: You have to code your articles with the correct prose, structure, and signs to get uptake in the rationalist community. Once you see it, it's hard to miss.
Do you have any examples of this that predate that LW article? Ideally both the critique and its dismissal but just the critique would be great. The original HN submission had a few comments critiquing it but I didn't see anything in depth (or for that matter as strident).
Don't worry, HN commenters can figure out the truth about Yudkowsky's articles from the first principles. They have already figured out that EAs no longer care about curing malaria, despite https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities only being a Google search away.
At the end, they will give you a lecture about how everyone hates people who are smug and talk about things they have no clue about. The lecture will then get a lot of upvotes.
I wish more people who detest rationalist ideology were curious about actual evidence.
Similarly, Aurornis made a claim that "Scott Alexander predicted at least $250 million in damages from Black Lives Matter protests", when if fact (as the very link provided by Aurornis shows) Scott predicted that the probability of such thing happening was 30%, i.e. it's more likely not to happen.
Elsewhere in this thread, another user, tptacek, claims that "Scott Alexander published some of his best-known posts under his own name". When I asked him for evidence, he said "I know more about this than you, and I'm not invested in this discussion enough to educate you adversarially". Translated: no evidence provided.
.
From my perspective, this all kinda proves my point.
Is the rationality community the only place where people care about evidence? Of course not.
But is the rationality community a rare place where people can ask for evidence in an informal debate and reasonably expect to actually get it? Unfortunately, I think the evidence we got here points towards yes.
Hacker News is a website mostly visited by smart people who are curious about many things. They are even smart enough to notice that some claims are suspicious, and ask for evidence. But will they receive it? No, they usually won't.
And in the next debate on the same topic, most likely the same false claims will be made again, maybe by people who have learned them in this thread. And the claims will be upvoted again.
This is an aspect where the rationality community strives to do better. It is not about some people being smarter than others, or whatever accusations are typically made. It is about establishing social norms where people e.g. don't get upvoted for making unsubstantiated negative claims about someone they don't like, without being asked to back it up, or get downvoted.
> Aren't these the people who started the trend of writing things like "epistemic status: mostly speculation" on their blog posts? And writing essays about the dangers of overconfidence? And measuring how often their predictions turn out wrong? And maintaining webpages titled "list of things I was wrong about"?
There's a lot of in-group signaling in rationalist circles like the "epistemic status" taglines, posting predictions, and putting your humility on show.
This has come full-circle, though, and now rationalist writings are generally pre-baked with hedging, both-sides takes, escape hatches, and other writing tricks that make it easier to claim they weren't entirely wrong in the future.
A perfect exaple is the recent "AI 2027" doomsday scenario that predicts a rapid escalation of AI superpowers followed by disaster in only a couple years: https://ai-2027.com/
If you read the backstory and supporting blog posts from the authors they are filled to the brim with hedges and escape hatches. Scott Alexander wrote that it was something like "the 80th percentile of their fast scenario", which means when it fails to come true he can simple say it wasn't actually his median prediction anyway and that they were writing about the fast scenario. I can already predict that the "We were wrong" article will be more about what they got right with a heavy emphasis on the fact that it wasn't their real median prediction anyway.
I think this group relies heavily on the faux-humility and hedging because they've recognized how powerful it is to get people to trust them. Even the comment above is implying that because they say and do these things, they must be immune from the criticism delivered above. That's exactly why they wrap their posts in these signals, before going on to do whatever they were going to do anyway.
If you want to say their humility is not genuine, fine. I'm not sure I agree with it, but you are entitled to that view. But to simultaneously be attacking the same community for not ever showing a sense of maybe being wrong or uncertain, and also for expressing it so often it's become an in-group signal, is just too much cognitive dissonance.
That's my point: Their rhetorical style is interpreted by the in-group as a sort of weird infallibility. Like they've covered both sides and therefore the work is technically correct in all cases. Once they go through the hedging dance, they can put forth the opinion-based point they're trying to make in a very persuasive way, falling back to the hedging in the future if it turns out to be completely wrong.
The writing style looks different depending on where you stand: Reading it in the forward direction makes it feel like the main point is very likely. Reading it in the backward direction you notice the hedging and decide they were also correct. Yet at the time, the rationalist community attaches themselves to the position being pushed.
> But to simultaneously be attacking the same community for not ever showing a sense of maybe being wrong or uncertain, and also for expressing it so often it's become an in-group signal, is just too much cognitive dissonance.
That's a strawman argument. At no point did I "attack the community for not ever showing a sense of maybe being wrong or uncertain".
In most writing, people write less persuasively on topics they have less conviction in.
Ok, let's scroll up the thread. When I refer to "the specific criticism that I quoted", and when you say "implying that because they say and do these things, they must be immune from the criticism delivered above": what do you think was the "criticism delivered above"? Because I thought we were talking about contrarian1234's claim to exactly this "strawman", and you so far have not appeared to not agree with me that this criticism was invalid.
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.)
“Damned if you do” indeed…
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.
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.
My point wasn't to nit-pick individual predictions, it was a general explanation of how the game is played.
Since Scott Alexander comes up a lot, a few randomly selected predictions that didn't come true:
- He predicted at least $250 million in damages from Black Lives Matter protests.
- He predicted Andrew Yang would win the 2021 NYC mayoral race with 80% certainty (he came in 4th place)
- He gave a 70% chance to Vitamin D being generally recognized as a good COVID treatment
This is just random samples from the first blog post that popped in Google: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/grading-my-2021-predictions
It's also noteworthy to read that a lot of his predictions are about his personal life, his own blogging actions, or [redacted] things. These all get mixed in with a small number of geopolitical, economic, and medical predictions with the net result of bringing his overall accuracy up.
(I feel like you're probably getting upvotes from people who feel similarly, but sometimes I feel like nobody ever writes "I agree with you" comments, so the impression is that there's only disagreement with some point being made.)
Then you start encountering the weirder parts. For me, it was the group think and hero worship. I just wanted to read interesting takes on new topics, but if you deviated from the popular narrative associated with the heroes (Scott Alexander, Yudkowski, Cowen, Aaronson, etc.) it felt like the community's immune system identified you as an intruder and started attacking.
I think a lot of people get drawn into the idea of it being a community where they finally belong. Especially on Twitter (where the latest iteration is "TPOT") it's extraordinarily clique-ish and defensive. It feels like high school level social dynamics at play, except the players are equipped with deep reserves of rhetoric and seemingly endless free time to dunk on people and send their followers after people who disagree. It's a very weird contrast to the ideals claimed by the community.
Since when is that what we do here? If he'd written that he'd decided to become vegetarian, would we all be out here talking about how vegetarians are so annoying and one of them even spat on my hamburger one time?
And then of these uncalled-for takedowns, several -- including yours -- don't even seem to be engaging in good-faith discourse, and seem happy to pile on to attacks even when they're completely at odds with their own arguments.
I'm sorry to say it but the one who decided to use their free time to leer at people un-provoked over the internet seems to be you.
(Indeed, I think it's in worse faith to try to guilt trip people who are just expressing critical opinions. It's fine - good, even! - to disagree with those people, but this particular comment has a very "how dare you criticize something!" tone that I don't think is constructive.)
I genuinely don't understand how you can point to someone's calibration curve where they've broadly done well, and cherry pick the failed predictions they made, and use this not just to claim that they're making bad predictions but that they're slimy about admitting error. What more could you possibly want from someone than a tally of their prediction record graded against the probability they explicitly assigned to it?
One man's modus ponens, as it goes.
lol, what? That was a civil comment. This seems like an excellent example of the point being made. Replying to a perfectly reasonable but critical comment with "please be civil" is super condescending.
So is stuff like "one man's modus ponens".
Look, we get it, you're talking to people who found this stuff smart and interesting in the past. But we got tired of it. For me, I realized after awhile that the people I most admired in real life were pretty much the opposite of the people I was reading the most on the internet. None of the smartest people I know talk in this snooty online iamsosmart style.
> This isn’t about me being an expert on these topics and getting them exactly right, it’s about me calibrating my ability to tell how much I know about things and how certain I am.
> At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30%
Aurornis:
> I forgot about the slightly condescending, lecturing tone that comes out when you disagree with rationalist figureheads.
> Since Scott Alexander comes up a lot, a few randomly selected predictions that didn't come true:
> He predicted at least $250 million in damages from Black Lives Matter protests.
Is this a "perfectly reasonable but critical comment"?
Am I condescending if I say that predicting a 30% chance that something happens means predicting a 70% chance that it won't happen... so the fact that it didn't happen probably shouldn't be used as "gotcha!"?
(I did waffle upon re-reading my comment and thinking it could have been more civil. But then decided that this person is also being very thin skinned. So I think you're right that we're both right.)
How was it condescending or lecturing?
> You could simply ask "Can you provide examples" instead of the "If you ____ then I suggest ____" form.
Why is that not equally condescending or lecturing?
It just isn't! An inability to accurately identify what comes off as condescending is kind of the point...
"Are you being condescending" is a subjective judgement that other people will make up their own minds about. You can't control what people think about things you say and do, and they aren't "oppressing" you by making up their own minds about that.
You seem to be trying to insinuate that Alexander et. al. are pretending to know how things will turn out and then hiding behind probabilities when they don't turn out that way. This is missing the point completely. The point is that when Alexander assigns an 80% probability to many different outcomes, about 80% of them should occur, and it should not be clear to anyone (including Alexander) ahead of time which 80%.
> He predicted at least $250 million in damages from Black Lives Matter protests.
Many sources estimated damages at $2 billion or more (see https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/02/22/fac... and links from there), so this did in fact come true.
Edit: I see that the prediction relates to 2021 specificially. In the wake of 2020, I think it was perfectly reasonable to make such a prediction at that confidence level, even if it didn't actually turn out that way.
> He predicted Andrew Yang would win the 2021 NYC mayoral race with 80% certainty (he came in 4th place)
> He gave a 70% chance to Vitamin D being generally recognized as a good COVID treatment
If you make many predictions at 70-80% confidence, as he does, you should expect 20-30% of them not to come true. It would in fact be a failure (underconfidence) if they all came true. You are in fact citing a blog post that is exactly about a self-assessment of those confidence levels.
Also, he gave a 70% chance to Vitamin D not being generally recognized as a good COVID treatment.
> These all get mixed in with a small number of geopolitical, economic, and medical predictions with the net result of bringing his overall accuracy up.
The point is not "overall accuracy", but overall calibration - i.e., whether his assigned probabilities end up making sense and being statistically validated.
You have done nothing to establish that any correlation between the category of prediction and his accuracy on them.
Yes that's the point, these people hedge like crazy to the point that they say nothing, they mean nothing, and effectively predict nothing.
> He predicted at least $250 million in damages from Black Lives Matter protests.
He says
> 5. At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30%
which, by my reading means he assigns it greater-than-even odds that _less_ than $250 million dollars in damages happened (I have no understanding of whether or not this result is the case, but my reading of your post suggests that you believe that this was indeed the outcome).
You say > He gave a 70% chance to Vitamin D being generally recognized as a good COVID treatment
while he says > Vitamin D is _not_ generally recognized (eg NICE, UpToDate) as effective COVID treatment: 70% (emphasis mine)
"Aren't these the people who"...
> And writing essays about the dangers of overconfidence? And measuring how often their predictions turn out wrong? And maintaining webpages titled "list of things I was wrong about"?
What's the value of that if it doesn't appear to be reasonably put to their own ideas. What you described otherwise is just another form of the exact kind of self-congratulation often (reasonably, IMO) lobbed at these "people"
Aren't these the people who started the trend of writing things like "epistemic status: mostly speculation" on their blog posts? And writing essays about the dangers of overconfidence? And measuring how often their predictions turn out wrong? And maintaining webpages titled "list of things I was wrong about"?
Are you sure you're not painting this group with an overly-broad brush?