We rationalists are very good at making predictions, and the best of us, such as Scott Alexander
This weird self-congratulatory tribalism is a completely unnecessary distraction from an otherwise informative post. Are “we” unusually good at making predictions, compared to similarly informed and motivated people who haven’t pledged fealty to our social group? How do you know?
Scott Alexander is a justly popular writer, and I’ve certainly benefitted from reading many of his posts, but it seems cultish and bizarre to put him on a pedestal as “the best” of “us” like this as the first sentence of a post that has nothing to do with him.
Overall great post: by retrospectively evaluating your prior predictions (documented so as to avoid one’s tendency to ‘nudge’ your memories based on actual events which transpired) using a ‘two valued’ Normal distribution (guess and ‘distance’ from guess as confidence interval), rather than a ‘single-valued’ bernoulli/binary distribution (yes/no on guess-actual over/under), one is able to glean more information and therefore more efficiently improve future predictions.
That opening statement, while good and useful, does come off a little ‘non sequitur’-ish. I urge to find a more impactful opening statement (but don’t ahve a recommendation, other than some simplification resulting from what I said above).
This weird self-congratulatory tribalism is a completely unnecessary distraction from an otherwise informative post. Are “we” unusually good at making predictions, compared to similarly informed and motivated people who haven’t pledged fealty to our social group? How do you know?
Scott Alexander is a justly popular writer, and I’ve certainly benefitted from reading many of his posts, but it seems cultish and bizarre to put him on a pedestal as “the best” of “us” like this as the first sentence of a post that has nothing to do with him.
changed to “Making predictions is a good practice, writing them down is even better.”
does anyone have a better way of introducing this post?
Overall great post: by retrospectively evaluating your prior predictions (documented so as to avoid one’s tendency to ‘nudge’ your memories based on actual events which transpired) using a ‘two valued’ Normal distribution (guess and ‘distance’ from guess as confidence interval), rather than a ‘single-valued’ bernoulli/binary distribution (yes/no on guess-actual over/under), one is able to glean more information and therefore more efficiently improve future predictions.
That opening statement, while good and useful, does come off a little ‘non sequitur’-ish. I urge to find a more impactful opening statement (but don’t ahve a recommendation, other than some simplification resulting from what I said above).
My original opening statement got trashed for being to self congratulatory, so the current one is a hot fix :), So I agree with you!
Hear, hear.
(Edit: the above post has 10 up votes, so many people feel like that, so I will change the intro)
You have two critiques:
Scott Alexander evokes tribalism
We predict more than people outside our group holding everything else constant
I was not aware of it, and I will change if more than 40% agree
Remove reference to Scott Alexander from the intro: [poll]{Agree}{Disagree}
I think this is true, but have no hard facts, more importantly you think I am wrong, or if this also evokes tribalism it should likewise be removed...
Also Remove “We rationalists are very good at making predictions” from the intro: [poll]{Agree}{Disagree}
If i remove both then I need a new intro :D