True or not, wouldn’t you say the idea it illustrates is sound? No matter how small a percentage of the time, a nonzero number of people claiming ridiculous things are telling the truth (just framing it in a ridiculous way with wrong correlations).
If as a society we investigated these cases more often instead of dismissing them, would it lead to a net positive for humanity? For example, if everyone heard “drinking mud soup in this specific part of the world consistently cures X affliction”, and dismissed it- wouldn’t most pharmaceutical companies not have found their star compounds used in bestselling drugs?
To be clear, I agree that majority of these wild tales lead nowhere, but I wonder if it’s worth investigating even for the minority of cases which lead somewhere unexpected.
If investigating things was was free, sure. But the reason we don’t investigate things is that doing so takes time, and the expected value of finding something novel is often lower than the expected cost of an investigation. To make it concrete, the story as presented is an insane way to run a company and would result in spending an enormous number of engineer hours on wild goose chases. If I as the CEO found out a middle manager was sending out engineers on four day assignments to everyone who writes us a crazy-sounding letter, I would tell him to immediately stop wasting company resources.
I have no strong opinion on whether society investigates too many or too few of these claims, but I keep observing that many people’s models seem to lack the “maybe he’s lying” theory, which would give them an inflated estimate of the expected value for investigating things.
I am hopeful that cheaper expert intelligence via AI will lower investigation costs, and maybe help clear up some stubborn mysteries. Particularly ones related to complex contexts, like medicine and biology.
Yes to both! The lying model is great to have especially on the internet where everyone trolls for fun. But to Nathan’s point especially as cost of intellectual labor goes to zero, the net benefits of investigating these cases would keep increasing. Seems worth a try to find some obscure low hanging fruit!
This definitely happens too, but have you ever had to deal with customer service departments unwilling to think anything is something other than the most obvious? Or dealt with a hard to diagnose medical condition and had doctor after doctor keep insisting on going through the same useless-to-you diagnostic flow chart until you finally find one willing to actually think with you?
In some contexts, there’s also the opposite problem of people seeing a hard to understand problem and insisting they need to investigate when that’s not necessary for finding a solution. In analogy to the (yes, very possibly false) vanilla ice cream story, the man could have tried switching brands of vanilla, or walking to the aisle instead of buying from the endcap, or buying multiple pints of ice cream during normal grocery shopping to last the week instead of making a special trip, without ever bothering to investigate. Or, if you have symptoms that your doctor thinks come from an inoperable congenital defect, but the solution for the symptoms is the same medication whether you have the defect or not, then there’s no value in finding the etiology, and no real reason for them to insist on expensive tests, but they often will anyway before treating, and pointing out this fact doesn’t always help.
True or not, wouldn’t you say the idea it illustrates is sound? No matter how small a percentage of the time, a nonzero number of people claiming ridiculous things are telling the truth (just framing it in a ridiculous way with wrong correlations).
If as a society we investigated these cases more often instead of dismissing them, would it lead to a net positive for humanity? For example, if everyone heard “drinking mud soup in this specific part of the world consistently cures X affliction”, and dismissed it- wouldn’t most pharmaceutical companies not have found their star compounds used in bestselling drugs?
To be clear, I agree that majority of these wild tales lead nowhere, but I wonder if it’s worth investigating even for the minority of cases which lead somewhere unexpected.
If investigating things was was free, sure. But the reason we don’t investigate things is that doing so takes time, and the expected value of finding something novel is often lower than the expected cost of an investigation. To make it concrete, the story as presented is an insane way to run a company and would result in spending an enormous number of engineer hours on wild goose chases. If I as the CEO found out a middle manager was sending out engineers on four day assignments to everyone who writes us a crazy-sounding letter, I would tell him to immediately stop wasting company resources.
I have no strong opinion on whether society investigates too many or too few of these claims, but I keep observing that many people’s models seem to lack the “maybe he’s lying” theory, which would give them an inflated estimate of the expected value for investigating things.
I am hopeful that cheaper expert intelligence via AI will lower investigation costs, and maybe help clear up some stubborn mysteries. Particularly ones related to complex contexts, like medicine and biology.
Yes to both! The lying model is great to have especially on the internet where everyone trolls for fun. But to Nathan’s point especially as cost of intellectual labor goes to zero, the net benefits of investigating these cases would keep increasing. Seems worth a try to find some obscure low hanging fruit!
This definitely happens too, but have you ever had to deal with customer service departments unwilling to think anything is something other than the most obvious? Or dealt with a hard to diagnose medical condition and had doctor after doctor keep insisting on going through the same useless-to-you diagnostic flow chart until you finally find one willing to actually think with you?
In some contexts, there’s also the opposite problem of people seeing a hard to understand problem and insisting they need to investigate when that’s not necessary for finding a solution. In analogy to the (yes, very possibly false) vanilla ice cream story, the man could have tried switching brands of vanilla, or walking to the aisle instead of buying from the endcap, or buying multiple pints of ice cream during normal grocery shopping to last the week instead of making a special trip, without ever bothering to investigate. Or, if you have symptoms that your doctor thinks come from an inoperable congenital defect, but the solution for the symptoms is the same medication whether you have the defect or not, then there’s no value in finding the etiology, and no real reason for them to insist on expensive tests, but they often will anyway before treating, and pointing out this fact doesn’t always help.