That’s… a surprisingly detailed and interesting analysis, potentially worthy of a separate post. My prototypical example would be something like
Your friend who is a VP at public company XCOMP says “this quarter has been exceptionally busy, we delivered a record number of widgets and have a backlog of new orders enough to last a year. So happy about having all this vested stock options”
You decide that XCOMP is a good investment, since your friend is trustworthy, has the accurate info, and would not benefit from you investing in XCOMP.
You plunk a few grand into XCOMP stock.
The stock value drops after the next quarterly report.
You mention it to your friend, who says “yeah, it’s risky to invest in a single stock, no matter how good the company looks, I always diversify.”
What happened here is that your friend’s odds of the stock going up was maybe 50%, while you assumed that, because you find them 99% trustworthy, you estimated the odds of XCOMP going up as 90%. That is the uninformed elevation of trust I am talking about.
Another example: Elon Musk says “We will have full self-driving ready to go later this year”. You, as an Elon fanboy, take it as a gospel and rush to buy the FSD option for your Model 3. While, if pressed, Elon would say that “I am confident that we can stick to this aggressive timeline if everything goes smoothly” (which it never does).
So, it’s closer to what you call the Assumption Amnesia, as I understand it.
As one further remark, I actually think it’s often good to practice Gell-Mann Amnesia.
Just because someone is an expert in one domain, does not mean they should be assumed an expert in other domains. Likewise, just because someone lacks knowledge in one domain, does not meant they should be assumed to lack knowledge in others.
It seems epistemically healthy to practice identifying the specific areas in which a particular person or source is expert, and distinguishing them carefully from the areas where they are not.
One of the tricky bits is that a newspaper makes this somewhat difficult. By purporting to cover all topics, yet actually aggregating the views of a wide range of journalists and editors, it makes it very hard to build stable knowledge about the newspapers’ epistemics. It would be better to pick a particular journalist and get a sense of how much they know about a particular topic that they cover frequently, but this isn’t easy to do in a newspaper format.
Ultimately, possession of a sophisticated prior on the credibility of any source on any topic is an achievement not lightly obtained.
I think there’s a difference between ignoring a stated assumption, and failing to infer an unstated assumption. In the example I generated from your OP as an illustration of Assumption Amnesia, the problem was ignoring a stated assumption (“Whenever we have no independent means of checking the veracity of the data.”).
By contrast, in the hypothetical cases you present, the problem is failing to infer an unstated assumption (“it’s risky to invest in a single stock, no matter how good the company looks, I always diversify” and “if everything goes smoothly, which it never does”).
My central case for Assumption Amnesia is the former—ignoring a stated assumption. I think the latter is at least as important, but is also more forgivable. It depends on sheer expertise/sophisticated application of heuristics. Taken literally, the hypothetical Musk statement would justify buying the FSD option. It seems related to the problem of knowing when to take a religious, political, poetic, or joking statment literally, figuratively, or as an exaggeration; and when it’s meant specifically and seriously.
In any case, all these seem to be component challenges of the overall problem of interpreting statements in context. It does seem quite useful to break that skill up into factors that can be individually examined and practiced.
That’s… a surprisingly detailed and interesting analysis, potentially worthy of a separate post. My prototypical example would be something like
Your friend who is a VP at public company XCOMP says “this quarter has been exceptionally busy, we delivered a record number of widgets and have a backlog of new orders enough to last a year. So happy about having all this vested stock options”
You decide that XCOMP is a good investment, since your friend is trustworthy, has the accurate info, and would not benefit from you investing in XCOMP.
You plunk a few grand into XCOMP stock.
The stock value drops after the next quarterly report.
You mention it to your friend, who says “yeah, it’s risky to invest in a single stock, no matter how good the company looks, I always diversify.”
What happened here is that your friend’s odds of the stock going up was maybe 50%, while you assumed that, because you find them 99% trustworthy, you estimated the odds of XCOMP going up as 90%. That is the uninformed elevation of trust I am talking about.
Another example: Elon Musk says “We will have full self-driving ready to go later this year”. You, as an Elon fanboy, take it as a gospel and rush to buy the FSD option for your Model 3. While, if pressed, Elon would say that “I am confident that we can stick to this aggressive timeline if everything goes smoothly” (which it never does).
So, it’s closer to what you call the Assumption Amnesia, as I understand it.
As one further remark, I actually think it’s often good to practice Gell-Mann Amnesia.
Just because someone is an expert in one domain, does not mean they should be assumed an expert in other domains. Likewise, just because someone lacks knowledge in one domain, does not meant they should be assumed to lack knowledge in others.
It seems epistemically healthy to practice identifying the specific areas in which a particular person or source is expert, and distinguishing them carefully from the areas where they are not.
One of the tricky bits is that a newspaper makes this somewhat difficult. By purporting to cover all topics, yet actually aggregating the views of a wide range of journalists and editors, it makes it very hard to build stable knowledge about the newspapers’ epistemics. It would be better to pick a particular journalist and get a sense of how much they know about a particular topic that they cover frequently, but this isn’t easy to do in a newspaper format.
Ultimately, possession of a sophisticated prior on the credibility of any source on any topic is an achievement not lightly obtained.
I think there’s a difference between ignoring a stated assumption, and failing to infer an unstated assumption. In the example I generated from your OP as an illustration of Assumption Amnesia, the problem was ignoring a stated assumption (“Whenever we have no independent means of checking the veracity of the data.”).
By contrast, in the hypothetical cases you present, the problem is failing to infer an unstated assumption (“it’s risky to invest in a single stock, no matter how good the company looks, I always diversify” and “if everything goes smoothly, which it never does”).
My central case for Assumption Amnesia is the former—ignoring a stated assumption. I think the latter is at least as important, but is also more forgivable. It depends on sheer expertise/sophisticated application of heuristics. Taken literally, the hypothetical Musk statement would justify buying the FSD option. It seems related to the problem of knowing when to take a religious, political, poetic, or joking statment literally, figuratively, or as an exaggeration; and when it’s meant specifically and seriously.
In any case, all these seem to be component challenges of the overall problem of interpreting statements in context. It does seem quite useful to break that skill up into factors that can be individually examined and practiced.