Agreed that some people were awful, but I still think this problem applies.
If somebody says “There’s a 80% chance of rain today, you idiot, and everyone who thinks otherwise deserves to die”, then it’s still not clear that a sunny day has proven them wrong. Or rather, they were always wrong to be a jerk, but a single run of the experiment doesn’t do much to prove they were wronger than we already believed.
Or rather, they were always wrong to be a jerk, but a single run of the experiment doesn’t do much to prove they were wronger than we already believed.
To be clear, I agree with this. Furthermore, while I don’t remember people giving probability distributions, I think it’s fair to guess that critics as a whole (and likely even the irrational critics) put higher probability on the coarse description of what actually happened than Duncan or those of us that tried the experiment, and that makes an “I told you so!” about assigning lower probability to something that didn’t happen hollow.
I agree with this. Perhaps a better expression of the thing (if I had felt like it was the right spot in the piece to spend this many words) would’ve been:
they were systematically wrong then, in loudly espousing beliefs whose truth value was genuinely in question but for which they had insufficient justification, and wrong in terms of their belongingness within the culture of a group of people who want to call themselves “rationalists” and who care about making incremental progress toward actual truth, and I believe that the sacrifice of their specific, non-zero, non-useless data and perspective is well worth making to have the correct walls around our garden and weeding heuristics within it. And I see no reason for that to have changed in the intervening six months.
I suspect that coming out of the gate with that many words would’ve pattern-matched to whining, though, and that my specific parenthetical was still stronger once you take into account social reality.
I’m curious if you a) agree or disagree or something-else with the quote above, and b) agree or disagree or something-else with my prediction that the above would’ve garnered a worse response.
Agreed that some people were awful, but I still think this problem applies.
If somebody says “There’s a 80% chance of rain today, you idiot, and everyone who thinks otherwise deserves to die”, then it’s still not clear that a sunny day has proven them wrong. Or rather, they were always wrong to be a jerk, but a single run of the experiment doesn’t do much to prove they were wronger than we already believed.
To be clear, I agree with this. Furthermore, while I don’t remember people giving probability distributions, I think it’s fair to guess that critics as a whole (and likely even the irrational critics) put higher probability on the coarse description of what actually happened than Duncan or those of us that tried the experiment, and that makes an “I told you so!” about assigning lower probability to something that didn’t happen hollow.
I agree with this. Perhaps a better expression of the thing (if I had felt like it was the right spot in the piece to spend this many words) would’ve been:
I suspect that coming out of the gate with that many words would’ve pattern-matched to whining, though, and that my specific parenthetical was still stronger once you take into account social reality.
I’m curious if you a) agree or disagree or something-else with the quote above, and b) agree or disagree or something-else with my prediction that the above would’ve garnered a worse response.