I feel conflicted about this post. Its central point as I’m understanding it is that much evidence we commonly encounter in varied domains is only evidence about the abundance of extremal values in some distribution of interest, and whether/how we should update our beliefs about the non-extremal parts of the distribution is very much dependent on our prior beliefs or gears-level understanding of the domain. I think this is a very important idea, and this post explains it well.
Also, felt inspired to search out other explanations of the moments of a distribution—this one looks pretty good to me so far.
On the other hand, the men’s rights discussion felt out of place to me, and unnecessarily so since I think other examples would be able to work just as well. Might be misjudging how controversial various points you bring up are, but as of now I’d rather see topics of this level of potential political heat discussed in personal blogposts or on other platforms, so long as they’re mostly unrelated to central questions of interest to rationalists / EAs.
I feel conflicted about this post. Its central point as I’m understanding it is that much evidence we commonly encounter in varied domains is only evidence about the abundance of extremal values in some distribution of interest, and whether/how we should update our beliefs about the non-extremal parts of the distribution is very much dependent on our prior beliefs or gears-level understanding of the domain. I think this is a very important idea, and this post explains it well.
Also, felt inspired to search out other explanations of the moments of a distribution—this one looks pretty good to me so far.
On the other hand, the men’s rights discussion felt out of place to me, and unnecessarily so since I think other examples would be able to work just as well. Might be misjudging how controversial various points you bring up are, but as of now I’d rather see topics of this level of potential political heat discussed in personal blogposts or on other platforms, so long as they’re mostly unrelated to central questions of interest to rationalists / EAs.