But that still doesn’t need to be luck. I got my priors offa evolution and they are capable of noticing when something works or doesn’t work a hundred times in a row. True, if I had a different prior, I wouldn’t care about that either. But even so, that I have this prior is not a question of luck.
It is luck in a sense—every way that your opinion differs from someone else, you believe that factors outside of your control (your intelligence, your education, et cetera) have blessed you in such a way that your mind has done better than that poor person’s.
It’s just that it’s not a problem. Lottery winners got richer than everyone else by luck, but that doesn’t mean they’re deluded in believing that they’re rich. But someone who had only weak evidence ze won the lottery should be very skeptical. The real point of this quote is that being much less wrong than average is an improbable state, and you need correspondingly strong evidence to support the possibility. I think many of the people on this site probably do have some of that evidence (things like higher than average IQ scores would be decent signs of higher than normal probability of being right) but it’s still something worth worrying about.
I think I agree with that: There’s nothing necessarily delusive about believing you got lucky, but it should generally require (at least) an amount of evidence proportional to the amount of purported luck.
Then it would make sense to use some evolutionary thingy instead of Bayesianism as your basic theory of “correct behavior”, as Shalizi has half-jokingly suggested.
But that still doesn’t need to be luck. I got my priors offa evolution and they are capable of noticing when something works or doesn’t work a hundred times in a row. True, if I had a different prior, I wouldn’t care about that either. But even so, that I have this prior is not a question of luck.
It is luck in a sense—every way that your opinion differs from someone else, you believe that factors outside of your control (your intelligence, your education, et cetera) have blessed you in such a way that your mind has done better than that poor person’s.
It’s just that it’s not a problem. Lottery winners got richer than everyone else by luck, but that doesn’t mean they’re deluded in believing that they’re rich. But someone who had only weak evidence ze won the lottery should be very skeptical. The real point of this quote is that being much less wrong than average is an improbable state, and you need correspondingly strong evidence to support the possibility. I think many of the people on this site probably do have some of that evidence (things like higher than average IQ scores would be decent signs of higher than normal probability of being right) but it’s still something worth worrying about.
I think I agree with that: There’s nothing necessarily delusive about believing you got lucky, but it should generally require (at least) an amount of evidence proportional to the amount of purported luck.
Then it would make sense to use some evolutionary thingy instead of Bayesianism as your basic theory of “correct behavior”, as Shalizi has half-jokingly suggested.