Nitpicking is absolutely critical in any public forum. Maybe in private, with only people who you know well and have very strong reason to believe are very much more likely to misspeak than to misunderstand, nitpicking can be overlooked. Certainly, I don’t nitpick every misspoken statement in private. But when those conditions do not hold, when someone is speaking on a subject I am not certain they know well, or when I do not trust that everyone in the audience is going to correctly parse the statement as misspoken and then correctly reinterpret the correct version, nitpicking is the only way to ensure that everyone involved hears the correct message.
Charitably I’ll guess that you dislike nitpicking because you already knew all those minor points, they were obvious to anyone reading after all, and they don’t have any major impact on the post as a whole. The problem with that is that not everyone who reads Less Wrong has a fully correct understanding of everything that goes into every post. They don’t spot the small mistakes, whether those be inconsequential math errors or a misapplication of some minor rule or whatever. And the problem is that just because the error was small in this particular context, it may be a large error in another context. If you mess up your math when doing Bayes’ Theorem, you may thoroughly confuse someone who is weak at math and trying to follow how it is applied in real life. In the particular context of this post, getting the direction of a piece of evidence wrong is inconsequential if the magnitude of that evidence is tiny. But if you are making a systematic error which causes you to get the direction of certain types of evidence, which are usually small in magnitude, wrong, then you will eventually make a large error. And unless you are allowed to call out errors dealing with small magnitude pieces of evidence, you won’t ever discover it.
I’d also like to say that just because a piece of evidence is “barely worth mentioning” when listing out evidence for and against a claim, does not mean that that evidence should be immediately thrown aside when found. The rules which govern evidence strong enough to convince me that 2+2=3 are the same rules that govern the evidence gained from the fact that when I drop an apple, it falls. You can’t just pretend the rules stop applying and expect to come out ok in every situation. In part you can gain practice from applying the rules to those situations, and in part it’s important to remember that they do still apply, even if in the end you decide that their outcome is inconsequential.
Nitpicking is absolutely critical in any public forum .
I disagree. Not all things that are true are either relevant or important. Irrelevancies and trivialities lower discussion quality, however impeccable their truth. There is practically nothing that anyone can say, that one could not find fault with, given sufficient motivation and sufficient disregard for the context that determines what matters and what does not.
In the case at hand, “evidence” sometimes means “any amount whatever, including zero”, sometimes “any amount whatever, except zero, including such quantities as 1/3^^^3”, and sometimes “an amount worth taking notice of”.
In practical matters, only the third sense is relevant: if you want to know the colour of crows, you must observe crows, not non-crows, because that is where the value of information is concentrated. The first two are only relevant in a technical, mathematical context.
The point of the Bayesian solution to Hempel’s paradox is to stop worrying about it, not to start seeing purple zebras as evidence for black crows that is worth mentioning in any other context than talking about Hempel’s paradox.
Nitpicking is absolutely critical in any public forum. Maybe in private, with only people who you know well and have very strong reason to believe are very much more likely to misspeak than to misunderstand, nitpicking can be overlooked. Certainly, I don’t nitpick every misspoken statement in private. But when those conditions do not hold, when someone is speaking on a subject I am not certain they know well, or when I do not trust that everyone in the audience is going to correctly parse the statement as misspoken and then correctly reinterpret the correct version, nitpicking is the only way to ensure that everyone involved hears the correct message.
Charitably I’ll guess that you dislike nitpicking because you already knew all those minor points, they were obvious to anyone reading after all, and they don’t have any major impact on the post as a whole. The problem with that is that not everyone who reads Less Wrong has a fully correct understanding of everything that goes into every post. They don’t spot the small mistakes, whether those be inconsequential math errors or a misapplication of some minor rule or whatever. And the problem is that just because the error was small in this particular context, it may be a large error in another context. If you mess up your math when doing Bayes’ Theorem, you may thoroughly confuse someone who is weak at math and trying to follow how it is applied in real life. In the particular context of this post, getting the direction of a piece of evidence wrong is inconsequential if the magnitude of that evidence is tiny. But if you are making a systematic error which causes you to get the direction of certain types of evidence, which are usually small in magnitude, wrong, then you will eventually make a large error. And unless you are allowed to call out errors dealing with small magnitude pieces of evidence, you won’t ever discover it.
I’d also like to say that just because a piece of evidence is “barely worth mentioning” when listing out evidence for and against a claim, does not mean that that evidence should be immediately thrown aside when found. The rules which govern evidence strong enough to convince me that 2+2=3 are the same rules that govern the evidence gained from the fact that when I drop an apple, it falls. You can’t just pretend the rules stop applying and expect to come out ok in every situation. In part you can gain practice from applying the rules to those situations, and in part it’s important to remember that they do still apply, even if in the end you decide that their outcome is inconsequential.
I disagree. Not all things that are true are either relevant or important. Irrelevancies and trivialities lower discussion quality, however impeccable their truth. There is practically nothing that anyone can say, that one could not find fault with, given sufficient motivation and sufficient disregard for the context that determines what matters and what does not.
In the case at hand, “evidence” sometimes means “any amount whatever, including zero”, sometimes “any amount whatever, except zero, including such quantities as 1/3^^^3”, and sometimes “an amount worth taking notice of”.
In practical matters, only the third sense is relevant: if you want to know the colour of crows, you must observe crows, not non-crows, because that is where the value of information is concentrated. The first two are only relevant in a technical, mathematical context.
The point of the Bayesian solution to Hempel’s paradox is to stop worrying about it, not to start seeing purple zebras as evidence for black crows that is worth mentioning in any other context than talking about Hempel’s paradox.