With very high confidence I know what I want. And for the most part, I don’t infer what I want by observing my own behavior, I observe what I want through introspection. With pretty high confidence, I know some of what other people want when they tell me what they want.
With weak to moderate confidence I can expect you to be drastically overconfident in your self-insight into what you want from introspection. (Simply because the probability that you are human is high, human introspection is biased in predictable ways and the evidence supplied by your descriptions of your introspection is insufficient to overcome the base rate.)
The evidence is that humans don’t act in ways entirely consistent with their stated preferences. There is no evidence that their stated preferences are not their preferences. You have to assume that how humans acts says more about their preferences than what they say about their preferences. You go down that path and you conclude that apples want to fall from trees.
There is no evidence that their stated preferences are not their preferences.
That’s an incredibly strong claim (“no evidence”). You are giving rather a lot of privilege to the hypothesis that the public relations module of the brain is given unfiltered access to potentially politically compromising information like that and then chooses to divulge it publicly. This is in rather stark contrast to what I have read and what I have experienced.
I’d like to live in a world where what you said is true. It would have saved me years of frustration.
You have to assume that how humans acts says more about their preferences than what they say about their preferences.
Both provide useful information, but not necessarily directly. fMRIs can be fun too, albeit just as tricky to map to the ‘want’ concept.
With weak to moderate confidence I can expect you to be drastically overconfident in your self-insight into what you want from introspection. (Simply because the probability that you are human is high, human introspection is biased in predictable ways and the evidence supplied by your descriptions of your introspection is insufficient to overcome the base rate.)
The evidence is that humans don’t act in ways entirely consistent with their stated preferences. There is no evidence that their stated preferences are not their preferences. You have to assume that how humans acts says more about their preferences than what they say about their preferences. You go down that path and you conclude that apples want to fall from trees.
That’s an incredibly strong claim (“no evidence”). You are giving rather a lot of privilege to the hypothesis that the public relations module of the brain is given unfiltered access to potentially politically compromising information like that and then chooses to divulge it publicly. This is in rather stark contrast to what I have read and what I have experienced.
I’d like to live in a world where what you said is true. It would have saved me years of frustration.
Both provide useful information, but not necessarily directly. fMRIs can be fun too, albeit just as tricky to map to the ‘want’ concept.