I should clarify that what I mean by “slow” was supposed to be in the cognitive / Kahneman sense. In most cases, as I said, “if you don’t need to make any decisions, at least file everything away and decide that it’s unclear.” Instead, what I see people do is jump to updating / grabbing a hypothesis, acting “fast.” The failure modes that this can cause will include over or under-updating, ignoring “missing” hypotheses and not thinking of alternative explanations, narrowing the hypotheses too early, not updating marginally, etc.
Given that, I think I agree on all of the substantive points. However, I will note that including an explicit “other” category is tricky, but critical. The problem is that given such a category, over time it’s more plausible than anything else. It turns into the equivalent of “the witch down the road did it,” which is super-parsimonious and can explain anything.
And slowness in the sense you thought I was talking about is equivalent to lowering the weight on evidence, or to having a higher weight on priors. Strength of priors and how much to weight evidence are good questions to discuss, and can be tricky, but weren’t my point in this post.
I should clarify that what I mean by “slow” was supposed to be in the cognitive / Kahneman sense. In most cases, as I said, “if you don’t need to make any decisions, at least file everything away and decide that it’s unclear.” Instead, what I see people do is jump to updating / grabbing a hypothesis, acting “fast.” The failure modes that this can cause will include over or under-updating, ignoring “missing” hypotheses and not thinking of alternative explanations, narrowing the hypotheses too early, not updating marginally, etc.
Given that, I think I agree on all of the substantive points. However, I will note that including an explicit “other” category is tricky, but critical. The problem is that given such a category, over time it’s more plausible than anything else. It turns into the equivalent of “the witch down the road did it,” which is super-parsimonious and can explain anything.
And slowness in the sense you thought I was talking about is equivalent to lowering the weight on evidence, or to having a higher weight on priors. Strength of priors and how much to weight evidence are good questions to discuss, and can be tricky, but weren’t my point in this post.