If we are going to have any heuristics that say that some kinds of evidence tend to be overused or underused, we have to be able to talk about sets of evidence that are less than than the total set. The whole point here is to warn people about our evidence that suggests people tend to over-rely on inside evidence relative to outside evidence.
Agreed. My objection is to cases where inside view arguments are discounted completely on the basis of experiments that have shown optimism bias among humans, but where it isn’t clear that optimism bias actually applies to the subject matter at hand. So my disagreement is about degrees rather than absolutes: How widely can the empirical support for optimism bias be generalized? How much should inside view arguments be discounted? My answers would be, roughly, “not very widely” and “not much outside traditional forecasting situations”. I think these are tangible (even empirical) questions and I will try to write a top-level post on this topic.
If we are going to have any heuristics that say that some kinds of evidence tend to be overused or underused, we have to be able to talk about sets of evidence that are less than than the total set. The whole point here is to warn people about our evidence that suggests people tend to over-rely on inside evidence relative to outside evidence.
Agreed. My objection is to cases where inside view arguments are discounted completely on the basis of experiments that have shown optimism bias among humans, but where it isn’t clear that optimism bias actually applies to the subject matter at hand. So my disagreement is about degrees rather than absolutes: How widely can the empirical support for optimism bias be generalized? How much should inside view arguments be discounted? My answers would be, roughly, “not very widely” and “not much outside traditional forecasting situations”. I think these are tangible (even empirical) questions and I will try to write a top-level post on this topic.