Yeah, as a matter of *history* (why the norm emerged as opposed to why it's kept going), I think the 'quantifiable forecasts' thing came from three interrelated sources: Eliezer Yudkowsky's insistence that we must "make beliefs pay rent", which required people to back up all of their claims by some "anticipated experience" that the claims mapped onto; Tetlock's work on good judgment which seemed to suggest that the ability to anticipate and forecast required numerical precision; and Robin Hanson's idea of prediction markets, which offered a way to operationalise numerical precision about predictions. I think the influence of these figures on rationalism explains where the norm comes from. Ultimately, all of them are grounded in the same basic impulse: Bayesian epistemology.
Interesting, but I think the norm of Extreme Honesty among EAs/Rationalists emerged before many of them were on Substack.
Yeah, as a matter of *history* (why the norm emerged as opposed to why it's kept going), I think the 'quantifiable forecasts' thing came from three interrelated sources: Eliezer Yudkowsky's insistence that we must "make beliefs pay rent", which required people to back up all of their claims by some "anticipated experience" that the claims mapped onto; Tetlock's work on good judgment which seemed to suggest that the ability to anticipate and forecast required numerical precision; and Robin Hanson's idea of prediction markets, which offered a way to operationalise numerical precision about predictions. I think the influence of these figures on rationalism explains where the norm comes from. Ultimately, all of them are grounded in the same basic impulse: Bayesian epistemology.