While not a good direct answer to your question I think an old economics article, The Origins of Predictable Behavior, (Ron Heiner, AER 1984 I think) looks into low probability, high cost situations to suggest such setting will tent to support the emergence of social rules and norms to mitigate the risks.
That misses my point, which is that trusting the judgment of someone who is proclaiming opaquely calculated but accurate estimates of low probability events without an extremely good calibration track record is a bad idea.
The point of (me linking) “Don’t fight the hypothetical” is that the author of the thought experiment could come here and comment “The boy has incredibly calibration about coyotes and other beasts, made using old predictions and cross validated with reserved old predictions, but the others in the village don’t know this and won’t listen now that he’s had one false alarm” and it would be completely uninteresting to discuss.
The reason that the villagers didn’t trust the boy that he didn’t have a track record. One reason we don’t trust people who are loudly proclaiming certain kinds of doom is that they don’t have a track record of accurately predicting things (e.g. Heaven’s Gate), and that’s an inherently important aspect of the phenomenon this post is describing. If the child had accurately predicted wolves in the past, real world villagers would have paid attention to a 15% warning.
The post is suggesting that certain kinds of risks have low probability, and the predictors don’t have a track record of success because it’s impossible, but that they have other lines of evidence that can be used to justify their probability estimates. In the case of “nuclear war that hasn’t happened despite the scares” the evidence is events like the Cuban missile crisis or Petrov Day. But in the parable, it isn’t established that the child has good arguments to justify 5% or 15% wolf appearance rates.
Small probabilities are hard to calculate accurately. How did the boy know that it was a 5% chance and not 0.001% chance?
While not a good direct answer to your question I think an old economics article, The Origins of Predictable Behavior, (Ron Heiner, AER 1984 I think) looks into low probability, high cost situations to suggest such setting will tent to support the emergence of social rules and norms to mitigate the risks.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/neQ7eXuaXpiYw7SBy/the-least-convenient-possible-world
https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/dont-fight-the-hypothetical
That misses my point, which is that trusting the judgment of someone who is proclaiming opaquely calculated but accurate estimates of low probability events without an extremely good calibration track record is a bad idea.
The point of (me linking) “Don’t fight the hypothetical” is that the author of the thought experiment could come here and comment “The boy has incredibly calibration about coyotes and other beasts, made using old predictions and cross validated with reserved old predictions, but the others in the village don’t know this and won’t listen now that he’s had one false alarm” and it would be completely uninteresting to discuss.
The reason that the villagers didn’t trust the boy that he didn’t have a track record. One reason we don’t trust people who are loudly proclaiming certain kinds of doom is that they don’t have a track record of accurately predicting things (e.g. Heaven’s Gate), and that’s an inherently important aspect of the phenomenon this post is describing. If the child had accurately predicted wolves in the past, real world villagers would have paid attention to a 15% warning.
The post is suggesting that certain kinds of risks have low probability, and the predictors don’t have a track record of success because it’s impossible, but that they have other lines of evidence that can be used to justify their probability estimates. In the case of “nuclear war that hasn’t happened despite the scares” the evidence is events like the Cuban missile crisis or Petrov Day. But in the parable, it isn’t established that the child has good arguments to justify 5% or 15% wolf appearance rates.