Generally, when I ask the sort of questions Pat Modesto does it’s because I want to see proof that someone has really thought a course of action through. It’s not about status, I’m asking to see your hero license because I want a costly signal that you’re not full of shit. In your post you write the following in argument against:
stranger: Wrong. Your model of heroic status is that it ought to be a reward for heroic service to the tribe. You think that while of course we should discourage people from claiming this heroic status without having yet served the tribe, no one should find it intuitively objectionable to merely try to serve the tribe, as long as they’re careful to disclaim that they haven’t yet served it and don’t claim that they already deserve the relevant status boost.
Actually, this is in fact largely how it works as far as I know. However, helping costs resources. So any time I have to consider whether to help you I need to evaluate your chances of success. Without knowing very much about your personality, which is very different from your goals, I have no way of knowing whether you’re the type to bullshit yourself. That’s why having a variant of Pat Modesto in your head is useful. A cognitive frame that looks at yourself from the outside view and asks if there’s any reason we should expect your 10% sense of success to be better than anyone else’s. And in point of fact, with you writing HPMOR there absolutely was. If anything the problem is that you’re being too nice to Pat. He’s asking you to justify something tangled up with his identity, and unfortunately to cut your opponent it’s that identity you’ll need to slash through. Here is how I’d respond to Pat:
Hypothesis: Okay Patrick, I see what’s going on here. What you have to understand is that when I say I expect my fanfiction to be successful, a lot of the things you see as key metrics predicting my success are in fact precisely the reasons why my fanfiction has the potential to be the most reviewed Harry Potter fanfic of all time. It’s precisely because I haven’t had current top authors review my plot or consciously emulated what’s been most successful beforehand or looked at what Harry Potter fanfic readers like that I have any chance at all.
Pat: What? I’ve been trying to be polite but this is nonsense, crazytalk, do you have any idea what a fucking crank you are?
Hypothesis: No see, it’s not that I’m mistaken about how much of a crank I am. It’s more that you’re mistaken about how much what your community has matters. The truth of things is that Harry Potter fanfiction is an inbred genre written by people who are heavily selection biased through founder effects to care about stuff which will never let them write the most popular possible Harry Potter fanfiction. In fact, I don’t even expect to write the most popular possible fanfiction, just the one which empirically happens to be the most popular (with 10% probability of course). The reason why it doesn’t matter what top Harry Potter fanfic authors think, or what the community thinks, is that my story is not primarily a work of Harry Potter fanfiction. It’s a story about rationality that incidentally takes place in the Harry Potter universe with Harry-But-Not-Harry as the protagonist. The Harry Potter fanfic community has put thousands and thousands of hours of work into creating the best fanfic. However, it doesn’t matter how many Erlangs of work you do if you do the work in the wrong direction, or inside a local maxima that will never let you make progress towards the global maxima. For that reason, I’m not particularly worried if my fanfiction is controversial in your community.
Pat: Okay, and what makes you so much better?
Hypothesis: It’s not necessarily a matter of ‘better’, so much as it is one of basic interest and demographics. I think what I’m writing has the potential to both more useful and more interesting to a wider audience than even the best Harry Potter fanfiction that currently exists. As a consequence, it may attract that math Olympiad to MIRI. The good news is that even if it doesn’t, it’s just a thing I’m doing in my off hours anyway. It’s more useful than watching TV and even the mistaken belief that I have a 10% shot at things will motivate me to keep typing. Speaking of which…
Pat: Right, sorry. Um, can I read it when it’s done?
Hypothesis: Of course.
My honest opinion is that if you can’t dispatch Pat in about five minutes intellectually and rhetorically you haven’t put enough points into either the plan or your general verbal combat abilities.
ps. Having read HPMOR in 2011 when I was 14, it’s amusing to think you haven’t met us youngsters yet. I know there’s at least a handful of us out there.
Indeed, I agree with you 100% that EY could have convinced Pat to raise his probability if he had used better arguments (though 10% might still be a bit too high). But some things about your comment are weird to me. Why do you say “dispatch” instead of “reach agreement”? Why say “[EY is] being too nice” instead of “EY is defending his point poorly”? From my point of view, Pat is being reasonable and is merely missing some information that EY is failing to provide. From EY’s point of view, Pat is doing something fundamentally wrong. Your comment is defending my point with its content, but it’s phrased as though it defended EY’s.
Generally, when I ask the sort of questions Pat Modesto does it’s because I want to see proof that someone has really thought a course of action through. It’s not about status, I’m asking to see your hero license because I want a costly signal that you’re not full of shit. In your post you write the following in argument against:
Actually, this is in fact largely how it works as far as I know. However, helping costs resources. So any time I have to consider whether to help you I need to evaluate your chances of success. Without knowing very much about your personality, which is very different from your goals, I have no way of knowing whether you’re the type to bullshit yourself. That’s why having a variant of Pat Modesto in your head is useful. A cognitive frame that looks at yourself from the outside view and asks if there’s any reason we should expect your 10% sense of success to be better than anyone else’s. And in point of fact, with you writing HPMOR there absolutely was. If anything the problem is that you’re being too nice to Pat. He’s asking you to justify something tangled up with his identity, and unfortunately to cut your opponent it’s that identity you’ll need to slash through. Here is how I’d respond to Pat:
My honest opinion is that if you can’t dispatch Pat in about five minutes intellectually and rhetorically you haven’t put enough points into either the plan or your general verbal combat abilities.
ps. Having read HPMOR in 2011 when I was 14, it’s amusing to think you haven’t met us youngsters yet. I know there’s at least a handful of us out there.
Indeed, I agree with you 100% that EY could have convinced Pat to raise his probability if he had used better arguments (though 10% might still be a bit too high). But some things about your comment are weird to me. Why do you say “dispatch” instead of “reach agreement”? Why say “[EY is] being too nice” instead of “EY is defending his point poorly”? From my point of view, Pat is being reasonable and is merely missing some information that EY is failing to provide. From EY’s point of view, Pat is doing something fundamentally wrong. Your comment is defending my point with its content, but it’s phrased as though it defended EY’s.