This is great. Feels like a very good catch. Attempting to start a comment thread doing a post-mortem of why this happened and what measures might make this sort of clarity-losing definition drift happen less in the future.
One thing I am a bit surprised by is that the definition on the tag page for inside/outside view was very clearly the original definition, and included a link to the Wikipedia for reference class forecasting in the second sentence. This suggests that the drifted definition was probably not held as an explicit belief by a large number of highly involved LessWrongers. This in turn makes two different mechanisms seem most plausible to me:
Maybe there was sort of a doublethink thing going on among experienced LW folks that made everyone use “outside view” differently in practice than how they explicitly would have defined it if asked. This would probably be mostly driven by status dynamics, and attempts to solve would just be a special case of trying to find ways to not create applause lights.
Maybe the mistake was mainly among relatively new/inexperienced LW folks who tried to infer the definition from context rather than checking the tag page. In that case, attempts to solve would mostly look like increasing the legibility of discourse within LW to new/inexperienced readers, possibly by making the tag definition pages more clickable or just decreasing the proliferation of jargon.
The funny thing is, I literally did a whole review+summary post of the Superforecasting literature and yet two years later I was using “outside view” to mean a whole bunch of not-particularly-related things! I think the applause light hypothesis is plausible.
This is great. Feels like a very good catch. Attempting to start a comment thread doing a post-mortem of why this happened and what measures might make this sort of clarity-losing definition drift happen less in the future.
One thing I am a bit surprised by is that the definition on the tag page for inside/outside view was very clearly the original definition, and included a link to the Wikipedia for reference class forecasting in the second sentence. This suggests that the drifted definition was probably not held as an explicit belief by a large number of highly involved LessWrongers. This in turn makes two different mechanisms seem most plausible to me:
Maybe there was sort of a doublethink thing going on among experienced LW folks that made everyone use “outside view” differently in practice than how they explicitly would have defined it if asked. This would probably be mostly driven by status dynamics, and attempts to solve would just be a special case of trying to find ways to not create applause lights.
Maybe the mistake was mainly among relatively new/inexperienced LW folks who tried to infer the definition from context rather than checking the tag page. In that case, attempts to solve would mostly look like increasing the legibility of discourse within LW to new/inexperienced readers, possibly by making the tag definition pages more clickable or just decreasing the proliferation of jargon.
The funny thing is, I literally did a whole review+summary post of the Superforecasting literature and yet two years later I was using “outside view” to mean a whole bunch of not-particularly-related things! I think the applause light hypothesis is plausible.