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wizzwizz4 2 hours ago

They were right about Bitcoin getting big (though I'm not aware of anyone putting their money where their mouth was), and they were a decent source of information leading up to the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic (which probably saved a handful of lives). Just because they're almost always aggressively wrong, that doesn't mean they're aggressively wrong about everything.

gzread 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It does mean you probably shouldn't listen to them, because the expected value of listening to them is negative.

wizzwizz4 14 minutes ago | parent [-]

It means I shouldn't listen to them in general. The LessWrongers are mainly wrong about things they think they understand: when they aren't overconfident, their improvisational skills tend to be decent. They were an excellent source of information about COVID-19, but they're a terrible source of information in the areas where they think they have expertise.

When there's a crisis, it's still worth checking in to see what the LessWrongers are saying about it, because it might be very useful, and it's pretty easy to tell: you just check whether it looks like they're doing science, or Rationalism™®, and only investigate further in the rare cases where it's the former.