So far, I genuinely have not gotten much object-level pushback on the most load-bearing points of my sequence, so, I'm not that worried.
I think this probably underestimates the severity of founder effects in this community. A salient example to me is precise Bayesianism (and the cluster of epistemologies that try to "approximate" Bayesianism): As far as I can tell, the rationalist and EA communities went over a decade without anyone within these communities pushing back on the true weak points of this epistemology, which is extremely load-bearing for cause prioritization. I think in hindsight we should have been worried about missing this sort of thing.
Examples of awareness growth vs. logical updates
(Thanks to Lukas Finnveden for discussion that prompted these examples, and for authoring examples #3-#6 verbatim.)
A key concept in the theory of open-minded updatelessness (OMU) is "awareness growth", i.e., conceiving of hypotheses you hadn't considered before. It's helpful to gesture at "discovering crucial considerations" as examples of awareness growth. But not all CC discoveries are awareness growth. And we might think we don't need this OMU idea if awareness growth is just logical updating, i.e. you already had nonzero credence in some hypothesis, but you changed this credence purely by thinking more. What's the difference? Here are some examples.
tendency to "bite bullets" or accepting implications that are highly counterintuitive to others or even to themselves, instead of adopting more uncertainty
I find this contrast between "biting bullets" and "adopting more uncertainty" strange. The two seem orthogonal to me, as in, I've ~just as frequently (if not more often) observed people overconfidently endorse their pretheoretic philosophical intuitions, in opposition to bullet-biting.
What other, perhaps slightly more complex or less obvious, crucial considerations are we still missing?
I agree this is very important. I've argued that if we appropriately price in missing crucial considerations,[1] we should consider ourselves clueless about AI risk interventions (here and here).
Also relatively prosaic causal pathways we haven't thought of in detail, not just high-level "considerations" per se.
A salient example to me: This post essentially consists of Paul briefly remarking on some mildly interesting distinctions about different kinds of x-risks, and listing his precise credences without any justification for them. It's well-written for what it aims to be (a quick take on personal views), but I don't understand why this post was so strongly celebrated.
I'm curious if you think you could have basically written this exact post a year ago. Or if not, what's the relevant difference? (I admit this is partly a rhetorical question, but it's mostly not.)
Oops, right. I think what's going on is:
Sorry, I don't understand the argument yet. Why is it clear that I should bet on odds P, e.g., if P is the distribution that the CCT says I should be represented by?
Thanks for explaining!
An intuitively compelling criterion is: these precise beliefs (which you are representable as holding) are within the bounds of your imprecise credences.
I think this is the step I reject. By hypothesis, I don't think the coherence arguments show that the precise distribution P that I can be represented as optimizing w.r.t. corresponds to (reasonable) beliefs. P is nothing more than a mathematical device for representing some structure of behavior. So I'm not sure why I should require that my representor — i.e., the set of probability distributions that would be no less reasonable than each other if adopted as beliefs[1] — contains P.
I'm not necessarily committed to this interpretation of the representor, but for the purposes of this discussion I think it's sufficient.
Fair enough! :) The parallel I had in mind was "[almost] no object level pushback", or at least almost no object level pushback that I can tell is based on an accurate understanding of my arguments.