I, too, am a bit confused about this one. I think it would improved if you could give some more examples of cases where people dismiss an argument because “but someone would have noticed”; you seem to be arguing that we shouldn’t do that, but since I have difficulty coming up with examples of people doing that in the first place, it ends up leaving me confused about this post.
One that I didn’t want to include in the post because I felt it would make it too inflammatory is this reaction to a particular conspiracy theory.
If anyone’s read the book “Matilda” (yes, yes, fictional evidence—I remark on plausibility only), they may remember the chillingly feasible technique of the abusive headmistress to pull stunts so outrageous that the students can’t get their parents to believe them. Surely someone would have noticed if the principal of a school had picked up a girl by her pigtails and flung her.
The heuristic of dismissing things that it seems someone would have noticed probably usually works, but the things that it wouldn’t work on are really big, and so I’m wary of it.
It only fails in cases where you wouldn’t notice if somebody else had noticed. In a school full of terrified children, each of whom incurs a huge risk in speaking up unilaterally / going to the media about the evil headmistress, it’s easy to believe that no one would have said anything. If it happened today, in the real world, I’d check www.ratemyteachers.com, where the incentives to rat on the headmistress are totally different.
The dominating principle (pun totally intended) is:
P(you heard about someone noticing|it’s true) = P(you would have heard someone noticed|someone noticed) * P(someone noticed|it’s true)
From there you can subtract from one to find the probability that you haven’t heard about anyone noticing given that it’s true, and then use Bayes’ Rule to find the chance that it’s true, given that you haven’t heard about anyone noticing...
...I think; I don’t trust my brain with any math problem longer than two steps, and I probably wrote several of those probabilities wrong. But the point is, you can do math to it, and the higher the probability that someone would have noticed if it wasn’t true, and the higher the probability that you would have heard about it if someone noticed, the higher the probability that, given you haven’t heard of anyone noticing it’s true, it’s not true.
For you to justify the rule in this post, you’d have to prove that people either systematically overestimate the chance that they’d hear of it if someone noticed, or the probability that someone would notice it if it were true.
P(you heard about someone noticing|it’s true) = P(you would have heard someone noticed|someone noticed) * P(someone noticed|it’s true)
The problem with the way a lot of people use that is that they compute P(someone noticed|it’s true) using someone=”anybody on earth”, and P(you would have heard someone noticed|someone noticed) using someone=”anyone among people they know well enough to talk about that”.
This might count—it’s the story of a flamboyantly abusive boss who got away with it for a long time. It seems to be partly that he was very good at working the system, and partly that the complaints about him seemed so weird that they were discounted.
One that I didn’t want to include in the post because I felt it would make it too inflammatory is this reaction to a particular conspiracy theory.
I assumed you had that exchange in mind. And it makes sense to avoid the inflammatory issue. But “someone would have noticed” was not what I was saying and that makes me wonder how often people actually do say “someone would have noticed”.
I wondered if that was the exchange she had in mind as well. I think the tactic of avoiding the specific issue is harmful to the point because as I was reading it I was thinking “is this is a prelude to trying to convince me of something which someone would have noticed is the natural reaction to, and if so why is the ground being laid so carefully?”. Reading this post makes me feel like I am being set up for some kind of sleight of hand argumentative trickery—my spider sense was tingling.
I did have the exchange in mind; I’m not trying to argue for a 9/11 conspiracy theory. I don’t even believe in a 9/11 conspiracy theory. I just think this sort of reaction to that among other conspiracy theories is a risky heuristic to employ.
I wondered if that was the exchange you were referring to and decided that you probably weren’t intending to argue for a 9/11 conspiracy theory so I started wondering what future post you were ‘softening us up’ for. That’s why I think the lack of specifics detracts from the post. I was so busy wondering what you were planning to try and persuade us of that it distracted from the explicit message of the post.
I’m not softening you up for anything. I don’t believe in anything that I’d expect people to react to in this way. It bothers me when folks do it to others. Do you think I should add this disclaimer to the post? Would it help?
It would probably have meant I was less distracted wondering what specific theory this post was laying the groundwork for, yes. I actually thought this was groundwork for something relating to SIAI—I’m not so sure you (or anyone here really) don’t believe certain things in this class of idea.
Isn’t it sad that you had to add this disclaimer? I’m not arguing you shouldn’t have done it, unfortunately I tend to agree that it was the right thing to do.
But, shouldn’t the post be judged on its own merit? Would it be looked at with different eyes if you wrote the disclaimer “I believe in conspiracy theories and I’m softening you up now.”
I actually will site this using Matilda’s wording of “Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it” as Trunchbell’s Law, both in terms of conventional actions and when taking Refuse in Audacity, but in my experience once the momentary shock wears off thecurve of people using this heuristic doesn’t goes up fast enough to make up for the massive amount of noticing.
I, too, am a bit confused about this one. I think it would improved if you could give some more examples of cases where people dismiss an argument because “but someone would have noticed”; you seem to be arguing that we shouldn’t do that, but since I have difficulty coming up with examples of people doing that in the first place, it ends up leaving me confused about this post.
One that I didn’t want to include in the post because I felt it would make it too inflammatory is this reaction to a particular conspiracy theory.
If anyone’s read the book “Matilda” (yes, yes, fictional evidence—I remark on plausibility only), they may remember the chillingly feasible technique of the abusive headmistress to pull stunts so outrageous that the students can’t get their parents to believe them. Surely someone would have noticed if the principal of a school had picked up a girl by her pigtails and flung her.
The heuristic of dismissing things that it seems someone would have noticed probably usually works, but the things that it wouldn’t work on are really big, and so I’m wary of it.
That sounds related to the “Big Lie” trick, actually.
It only fails in cases where you wouldn’t notice if somebody else had noticed. In a school full of terrified children, each of whom incurs a huge risk in speaking up unilaterally / going to the media about the evil headmistress, it’s easy to believe that no one would have said anything. If it happened today, in the real world, I’d check www.ratemyteachers.com, where the incentives to rat on the headmistress are totally different.
The dominating principle (pun totally intended) is:
P(you heard about someone noticing|it’s true) = P(you would have heard someone noticed|someone noticed) * P(someone noticed|it’s true)
From there you can subtract from one to find the probability that you haven’t heard about anyone noticing given that it’s true, and then use Bayes’ Rule to find the chance that it’s true, given that you haven’t heard about anyone noticing...
...I think; I don’t trust my brain with any math problem longer than two steps, and I probably wrote several of those probabilities wrong. But the point is, you can do math to it, and the higher the probability that someone would have noticed if it wasn’t true, and the higher the probability that you would have heard about it if someone noticed, the higher the probability that, given you haven’t heard of anyone noticing it’s true, it’s not true.
For you to justify the rule in this post, you’d have to prove that people either systematically overestimate the chance that they’d hear of it if someone noticed, or the probability that someone would notice it if it were true.
The problem with the way a lot of people use that is that they compute P(someone noticed|it’s true) using someone=”anybody on earth”, and P(you would have heard someone noticed|someone noticed) using someone=”anyone among people they know well enough to talk about that”.
Also “someone would have noticed” isn’t the same thing as “someone would have noticed and talked about”.
This might count—it’s the story of a flamboyantly abusive boss who got away with it for a long time. It seems to be partly that he was very good at working the system, and partly that the complaints about him seemed so weird that they were discounted.
I assumed you had that exchange in mind. And it makes sense to avoid the inflammatory issue. But “someone would have noticed” was not what I was saying and that makes me wonder how often people actually do say “someone would have noticed”.
I wondered if that was the exchange she had in mind as well. I think the tactic of avoiding the specific issue is harmful to the point because as I was reading it I was thinking “is this is a prelude to trying to convince me of something which someone would have noticed is the natural reaction to, and if so why is the ground being laid so carefully?”. Reading this post makes me feel like I am being set up for some kind of sleight of hand argumentative trickery—my spider sense was tingling.
I did have the exchange in mind; I’m not trying to argue for a 9/11 conspiracy theory. I don’t even believe in a 9/11 conspiracy theory. I just think this sort of reaction to that among other conspiracy theories is a risky heuristic to employ.
I wondered if that was the exchange you were referring to and decided that you probably weren’t intending to argue for a 9/11 conspiracy theory so I started wondering what future post you were ‘softening us up’ for. That’s why I think the lack of specifics detracts from the post. I was so busy wondering what you were planning to try and persuade us of that it distracted from the explicit message of the post.
I’m not softening you up for anything. I don’t believe in anything that I’d expect people to react to in this way. It bothers me when folks do it to others. Do you think I should add this disclaimer to the post? Would it help?
I’m not sure a disclaimer would be rhetorically convincing—it reads to me like your article is building towards a conclusion that never arrives.
It would probably have meant I was less distracted wondering what specific theory this post was laying the groundwork for, yes. I actually thought this was groundwork for something relating to SIAI—I’m not so sure you (or anyone here really) don’t believe certain things in this class of idea.
Added the disclaimer.
Isn’t it sad that you had to add this disclaimer? I’m not arguing you shouldn’t have done it, unfortunately I tend to agree that it was the right thing to do.
But, shouldn’t the post be judged on its own merit? Would it be looked at with different eyes if you wrote the disclaimer “I believe in conspiracy theories and I’m softening you up now.”
I actually will site this using Matilda’s wording of “Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it” as Trunchbell’s Law, both in terms of conventional actions and when taking Refuse in Audacity, but in my experience once the momentary shock wears off thecurve of people using this heuristic doesn’t goes up fast enough to make up for the massive amount of noticing.