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A review by hammo
Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck by Eliezer Yudkowsky
5.0
Having already read HPMOR and about half of The Sequences, I still hadn't made up my mind about whether EY had anything genuinely useful to say. Certainly his writing is interesting, and there are lots of interesting facts in it. But it's another question altogether as to whether the whole package of his writing is worthwhile. He is not at all shy about prescribing certain ways of thinking, and simply knowing lots of interesting trivia about the evolutionary psychology and the history of science is no basis for dispensing life advice. His writing does always bear the whiff of egotism-fodder. [Not an exact quote:] "Ah, my dear reader, because you have been initiated into the Bayesian Conspiracy, you too are far smarter than those so-called-academics, with their frequentist statistics and use of 'emergence' as a fake explanation."
This book convinced me that EY does actually have something genuinely enriching to say. Like Haidt's "The Righteous Mind", this book gives provides you with a shiny new tool for understanding the world. Whereas TRH allowed you to understand why other people have such perverse political opinions, this book allows you to understand why society can act so stupid sometimes, and how you should respond as an individual to such bewildering incompetence. In particular: When is it ok to think you're right and everyone else is wrong, and when can you expect to be able to do better than everyone else? Intellectual modesty is an over-correction for Dunning-Kruger. You can expect to know better than even experts (gasp!) if you 1) pay attention to predictive track records, and 2) pay attention to the dynamics of a system: whether you would expect a genuine improvement to actually be adopted.
Like most of EY's writing, could do with some trimming (I think the last couple of chapters could have been cut), but it's a huge improvement on the usual 1600 pages.
This book convinced me that EY does actually have something genuinely enriching to say. Like Haidt's "The Righteous Mind", this book gives provides you with a shiny new tool for understanding the world. Whereas TRH allowed you to understand why other people have such perverse political opinions, this book allows you to understand why society can act so stupid sometimes, and how you should respond as an individual to such bewildering incompetence. In particular: When is it ok to think you're right and everyone else is wrong, and when can you expect to be able to do better than everyone else? Intellectual modesty is an over-correction for Dunning-Kruger. You can expect to know better than even experts (gasp!) if you 1) pay attention to predictive track records, and 2) pay attention to the dynamics of a system: whether you would expect a genuine improvement to actually be adopted.
Like most of EY's writing, could do with some trimming (I think the last couple of chapters could have been cut), but it's a huge improvement on the usual 1600 pages.