Yeah, that thought was insufficiently explained, thanks for pointing that out! For me, Scott and Zvi are examples of people who are really good at “putting together pieces of evidence while tolerating huge amounts of uncertainty”. I think I don’t have that talent and I know I don’t have the experience (or patience) to pull that off.
When Scott and Zvi are doing one of their “Much more than you’d wanted to know” or “Covid Updates”, then they are operating at some kind of efficient frontier where a lot of the pieces need to be considered to provide a valuable perspective. Everybody and their dog has a perspective on lockdown effectiveness, so adding to that will require a lot of great epistemic work. But the work is worth it, because the question is important and the authors care deeply about the answer.
Drunk chess playing, in contrast, is pretty underexplored (in agreement with its striking unimportance in the grand scheme of things). So making some headway is relatively easy (low hanging fruit!) and the marginal increase in value that an extremely deep dive into the neuroscience literature provides is just less worth it.
Yeah, that thought was insufficiently explained, thanks for pointing that out! For me, Scott and Zvi are examples of people who are really good at “putting together pieces of evidence while tolerating huge amounts of uncertainty”. I think I don’t have that talent and I know I don’t have the experience (or patience) to pull that off.
But there is an interesting meta-point here: Epistemic work comes at a cost and knowing which rabbit holes not to go down is an important skill.
When Scott and Zvi are doing one of their “Much more than you’d wanted to know” or “Covid Updates”, then they are operating at some kind of efficient frontier where a lot of the pieces need to be considered to provide a valuable perspective. Everybody and their dog has a perspective on lockdown effectiveness, so adding to that will require a lot of great epistemic work. But the work is worth it, because the question is important and the authors care deeply about the answer.
Drunk chess playing, in contrast, is pretty underexplored (in agreement with its striking unimportance in the grand scheme of things). So making some headway is relatively easy (low hanging fruit!) and the marginal increase in value that an extremely deep dive into the neuroscience literature provides is just less worth it.