However the correct response is not the take the single data point provided more charitably.
You’re conflating two senses of “take a single data point charitably”: (a) “treat the data point as relatively strong evidence for a hypothesis”, and (b) “treat the author as having a relatively benign reason to cite the data point even though it’s weak”. The first is obviously bad (since we’re assuming the data is weak evidence), but you aren’t claiming I did the first thing. The second is more like what I actually said, but it’s not problematic (assuming I have a good estimate of the citer’s epistemics).
“Charity” framings are also confusingly imprecise in their own right, since like “steelmanning,” they naturally encourage people to equivocate between “I’m trying to get a more accurate read on you by adopting a more positive interpretation” and “I’m trying to be nice/polite to you by adopting a more positive interpretation”.
The correct response is to accept that this claim will never have high certainty.
A simple counterexample is “I assign 40:1 odds that my friend Bob has personality trait [blah],” where a lifetime of interactions with Bob can let you accumulate that much confidence without it being easy for you to compress the evidence into an elevator pitch that will push strangers to similar levels of confidence. (Unless the stranger simply defers to your judgment, which is different from them having access to your evidence.)
(a) “treat the data point as relatively strong evidence for a hypothesis”, <...>. The first is obviously bad (since we’re assuming the data is weak evidence), but you aren’t claiming I did the first thing.
Honestly, I’m not sure what you did. You said I should distinguish claims that can have short arguments and claims that can’t. I assumed that by “distinguish”, you meant we should update on the two claims differently, which sounds like (a). What did “distinguish” really mean?
(b) “treat the author as having a relatively benign reason to cite the data point even though it’s weak”
I wasn’t considering malicious/motivated authors at all. In my mind the climate supporter either doesn’t know about long term measurements, or doesn’t trust them for whatever reason. Sure, a malicious author would prefer using weak evidence when strong evidence exists, but they would also prefer topics where strong evidence doesn’t exist, so ultimately I don’t know in what way I should distinguish the two claims in relation to (b).
A simple counterexample is “I assign 40:1 odds that my friend Bob has personality trait [blah],” where a lifetime of interactions with Bob can let you accumulate that much confidence
The problem with many small pieces of evidence is that they are often correlated, and it’s easy not to account for that. The problem with humans is that they are very complicated, so you really shouldn’t have very high confidence that you know what’s going on in their heads. But I don’t think I would be able to show you that your confidence is too high. Of course, it is technically possible to reach high confidence with a large quantity of weak evidence, I just said it as a rule of thumb. By the way, 40:1 could be high or low confidence, depending on the prior probability of the trait.
You’re conflating two senses of “take a single data point charitably”: (a) “treat the data point as relatively strong evidence for a hypothesis”, and (b) “treat the author as having a relatively benign reason to cite the data point even though it’s weak”. The first is obviously bad (since we’re assuming the data is weak evidence), but you aren’t claiming I did the first thing. The second is more like what I actually said, but it’s not problematic (assuming I have a good estimate of the citer’s epistemics).
“Charity” framings are also confusingly imprecise in their own right, since like “steelmanning,” they naturally encourage people to equivocate between “I’m trying to get a more accurate read on you by adopting a more positive interpretation” and “I’m trying to be nice/polite to you by adopting a more positive interpretation”.
A simple counterexample is “I assign 40:1 odds that my friend Bob has personality trait [blah],” where a lifetime of interactions with Bob can let you accumulate that much confidence without it being easy for you to compress the evidence into an elevator pitch that will push strangers to similar levels of confidence. (Unless the stranger simply defers to your judgment, which is different from them having access to your evidence.)
Honestly, I’m not sure what you did. You said I should distinguish claims that can have short arguments and claims that can’t. I assumed that by “distinguish”, you meant we should update on the two claims differently, which sounds like (a). What did “distinguish” really mean?
I wasn’t considering malicious/motivated authors at all. In my mind the climate supporter either doesn’t know about long term measurements, or doesn’t trust them for whatever reason. Sure, a malicious author would prefer using weak evidence when strong evidence exists, but they would also prefer topics where strong evidence doesn’t exist, so ultimately I don’t know in what way I should distinguish the two claims in relation to (b).
The problem with many small pieces of evidence is that they are often correlated, and it’s easy not to account for that. The problem with humans is that they are very complicated, so you really shouldn’t have very high confidence that you know what’s going on in their heads. But I don’t think I would be able to show you that your confidence is too high. Of course, it is technically possible to reach high confidence with a large quantity of weak evidence, I just said it as a rule of thumb. By the way, 40:1 could be high or low confidence, depending on the prior probability of the trait.