I do think that having a good track record is what makes people credible and rather listen to people who got COVID-19 right at the start
I got Covid right at the start (among others) and I posted above that my track record is winning the largest prediction tournament at the time.
So let me repeat what I cared about conveying in this discussion, one last time:
The person in the youtube video you linked to may have gotten Covid right in early 2020, but so did hundreds of people (but maybe not thousands). Out of the set of people with a good track record on Covid, this guy is now pushing an extreme minority position. In theory, he could have been right with that. But he’s wrong because his arguments are bad in an easily verifiable way. Once someone’s core arguments for a fringe position (fringe in reference to the best sources we’d want to listen to here, not fringe with respect to the media) get discredited, there’s no reason to continue treating the fringe position as though it still has a high chance of being right. By that point, we must be prepared to say “This guy went off the rails.”
All I wanted to convey is that it makes no sense to continue holding a person’s specific opinion in high regards (good track record or not) when the opinion is highly contrarian* and just had its core arguments refuted. By continuing to argue as though the guy might still be right, you were employing a type of epistemology which, to me, seems doomed. I get the impression that you not only distrust the media consensus, but any consensus seems worthless to you when you see a single confident-sounding expert who stands out as having gotten something right when others had gotten it wrong. I think that’s too strong of an update, because lots of people got things right, and some of them may still be completely nuts and bad at reasoning, and we can spot that by checking things against a mental reference class of “consensus among the people we hold in high esteem.”
*Again, I’m talking about contrarian with respect to the sources we’d want to listen to. That’s a subjective reference class, but since we’re both on this site and value track records, our takes on this may not be crazily different. It is my highly confident impression that <3% of Lesswrongers with high karma, and <3% of people who got Covid right in the early days, think that the Delta variant is less deadly in unvaccinated population than the original variant.
I feel like we got sidetracked.
I got Covid right at the start (among others) and I posted above that my track record is winning the largest prediction tournament at the time.
So let me repeat what I cared about conveying in this discussion, one last time:
The person in the youtube video you linked to may have gotten Covid right in early 2020, but so did hundreds of people (but maybe not thousands). Out of the set of people with a good track record on Covid, this guy is now pushing an extreme minority position. In theory, he could have been right with that. But he’s wrong because his arguments are bad in an easily verifiable way. Once someone’s core arguments for a fringe position (fringe in reference to the best sources we’d want to listen to here, not fringe with respect to the media) get discredited, there’s no reason to continue treating the fringe position as though it still has a high chance of being right. By that point, we must be prepared to say “This guy went off the rails.”
All I wanted to convey is that it makes no sense to continue holding a person’s specific opinion in high regards (good track record or not) when the opinion is highly contrarian* and just had its core arguments refuted. By continuing to argue as though the guy might still be right, you were employing a type of epistemology which, to me, seems doomed. I get the impression that you not only distrust the media consensus, but any consensus seems worthless to you when you see a single confident-sounding expert who stands out as having gotten something right when others had gotten it wrong. I think that’s too strong of an update, because lots of people got things right, and some of them may still be completely nuts and bad at reasoning, and we can spot that by checking things against a mental reference class of “consensus among the people we hold in high esteem.”
*Again, I’m talking about contrarian with respect to the sources we’d want to listen to. That’s a subjective reference class, but since we’re both on this site and value track records, our takes on this may not be crazily different. It is my highly confident impression that <3% of Lesswrongers with high karma, and <3% of people who got Covid right in the early days, think that the Delta variant is less deadly in unvaccinated population than the original variant.