I have exhausted every rhetorical technique I am aware of to rephrase this point. I no longer have any hope on the matter, and frankly the behaviors I have begun to see out of many of you who are still in this thread have caused me to very seriously negatively reassess my opinion of this site’s community.
FWIW, for I think the first time I see LW as going more or less mad in perceiving value in a blog post linked to in the discussion section.
For what it is worth I hadn’t followed the thread and my impression when reading it after your priming was “just kinda ok”. The reasoning wasn’t absurd or anything but there isn’t any easy way to see how much influence that particular dynamic has had relative to other factors. My impression is that the effect is relatively minor.
I tentatively think any story humans tell about natural selection that obeys certain Darwinian and logical rules is true in that it must have an effect. However this effect may be too small to make any predictions from. This thought is under suspicion for committing the no true Scotsman fallacy.
An example is group selection. If humans can tell a non-flawed story about why it would be in a region of foxes’ benefit to individually restrain their breeding, this does not mean one can predict foxes can be seen to do this. It does mean that the effect itself is real subject to caveats about the rate of migration for foxes from one region to another, etc., such that under artificual enough conditions the real effect could be important. The problem is that there are a million other real effects that don’t come to mind as nice stories, and all have different vectors of effect.
This is why evolutionary psychology and the like is so bewitching and misleading. Pretty much all the effects postulated are true—though most are insignificant. People are entranced by their logical truth.
… I am unable to parse “FWIW, for I think the first time I see LW as going more or less mad in perceiving value in a blog post linked to in the discussion section.” to anything intelligible. What are you trying to say? I’ll wait until you respond before following the link.
Recently, I found myself disagreeing with dozens of LWers. Presumably, when this happens, sometimes I’m right and sometimes I’m wrong. Since I shouldn’t be totally confident I am right this time, how confident should I be?
Confidence in a given circumstance should be constrained by:
the available evidence at hand
how well you can demonstrate internal and external consistency in conforming to said evidence.
how well your understanding of that evidence allows you to predict outcomes of events associated with said evidence.
Any probabilities resultant from this would have to be taken as aggregates for predictive purposes, of course, and as such could not be ascribed as valid justification in any specific instance. (This caveat should be totally unsurprising from me at this point.)
how well you can demonstrate internal and external consistency in conforming to said evidence.
how well your understanding of that evidence allows you to predict outcomes of events associated with said evidence.
It’s a bit tricky because my position is that the post has practically no content and cannot be used to make predictions because it is a careful construction of an effect that is reasonable and does not contradict evidence, though it is in complete disregard of effect size.
After a brief skimming I have come to the conclusion that a brief skimming is not effective enough to provide a sufficient understanding of the conversation thread in question as to allow me to form any opinions on the topic.
tl;dr version: I skimmed it, and couldn’t wrap my head around it, so I’ll have to get back to you.
FWIW, for I think the first time I see LW as going more or less mad in perceiving value in a blog post linked to in the discussion section.
What are the chances I am wrong? Before looking at the subject itself and the comments there, what could we say about the chances I am wrong?
For what it is worth I hadn’t followed the thread and my impression when reading it after your priming was “just kinda ok”. The reasoning wasn’t absurd or anything but there isn’t any easy way to see how much influence that particular dynamic has had relative to other factors. My impression is that the effect is relatively minor.
I tentatively think any story humans tell about natural selection that obeys certain Darwinian and logical rules is true in that it must have an effect. However this effect may be too small to make any predictions from. This thought is under suspicion for committing the no true Scotsman fallacy.
An example is group selection. If humans can tell a non-flawed story about why it would be in a region of foxes’ benefit to individually restrain their breeding, this does not mean one can predict foxes can be seen to do this. It does mean that the effect itself is real subject to caveats about the rate of migration for foxes from one region to another, etc., such that under artificual enough conditions the real effect could be important. The problem is that there are a million other real effects that don’t come to mind as nice stories, and all have different vectors of effect.
This is why evolutionary psychology and the like is so bewitching and misleading. Pretty much all the effects postulated are true—though most are insignificant. People are entranced by their logical truth.
I think I agree with all of that (with the caveat that I don’t know exactly which Evolutionary Psychology claims you would dismiss as insignificant.)
… I am unable to parse “FWIW, for I think the first time I see LW as going more or less mad in perceiving value in a blog post linked to in the discussion section.” to anything intelligible. What are you trying to say? I’ll wait until you respond before following the link.
Recently, I found myself disagreeing with dozens of LWers. Presumably, when this happens, sometimes I’m right and sometimes I’m wrong. Since I shouldn’t be totally confident I am right this time, how confident should I be?
Ahh.
Confidence in a given circumstance should be constrained by:
the available evidence at hand
how well you can demonstrate internal and external consistency in conforming to said evidence.
how well your understanding of that evidence allows you to predict outcomes of events associated with said evidence.
Any probabilities resultant from this would have to be taken as aggregates for predictive purposes, of course, and as such could not be ascribed as valid justification in any specific instance. (This caveat should be totally unsurprising from me at this point.)
It’s a bit tricky because my position is that the post has practically no content and cannot be used to make predictions because it is a careful construction of an effect that is reasonable and does not contradict evidence, though it is in complete disregard of effect size.
After a brief skimming I have come to the conclusion that a brief skimming is not effective enough to provide a sufficient understanding of the conversation thread in question as to allow me to form any opinions on the topic.
tl;dr version: I skimmed it, and couldn’t wrap my head around it, so I’ll have to get back to you.