It might be worth emphasizing the difference between persuading people and being right. The kind of people who care about weirdness points are seldom the ones contributing good new data to any question of fact, nor those posing the best reasoning for judgments of value. I appreciate the impulse to try to convince people of things, but convincing people is extremely hard. I’m not Noam Chomsky; therefore, I have other things to do aside from thinking and arguing with people. And if I have to do one of those two worse in order to save time, I choose to dump the ‘convince people’ stat and load up on clear thinking.
Weirdness points are evidence of being wrong, since someone who holds positions different from everyone else on almost every point is probably willfully contrarian. So people who care about truth will also care about weirdness points; if someone is too weird (e.g. timecube), it is probably not worth your time listening to them.
I at least somewhat disagree with this. Weirdness is not a reliable measure of truth; in fact, I’d argue that it may even slightly anti-correlate with truth (but only slightly—it’s not like it anti-correlates so well that you’d be able to get a good picture of reality out of it by reversing it, mind you). After all, not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change. Every position that seems like common sense to us nowadays was once considered “weird” or “unusual”. So yeah, dismissing positions on the basis of weirdness alone doesn’t seem like that great of an idea; see the absurdity heuristic for further details.
Also, people often have reasons for discrediting things outside of striving for epistemic accuracy. Good people/causes can often be cast in a bad light by anyone who doesn’t like them; for instance*, RationalWiki’s article on Eliezer makes him so weird-sounding as to be absolutely cringeworthy to anyone who actually knows him, and yet plenty of people might read it and be turned off by the claims, just like they’re turned off from stuff like Time Cube.
*It is not my intention to start a flame-war or to cause a thread derailment by bringing up RW. I am aware that this sort of thing happens semi-frequently on LW, which is why I am stating my intentions here in advance. I would ask that anyone replying to this comment not stray too far from the main point, and in particular please do not bring up any RW vendettas. I am not a moderator, so obviously I have no power to enforce this request, but I do think that my request would prevent any derailment or hostility if acceded to. Thank you.
I think all three of us are right and secretly all agree.
(1) that weirdness points are bayesian evidence of being wrong (surely timecube doesn’t seem more accurate because no one believes it). Normal stuff is wrong quite a lot but not more wrong than guessing.
(2) weirdness points can never give you enough certainty to dismiss an issue completely. Time Cube is wrong because it is Time Cube (read: insane ramblings), not because it’s unpopular. Of course we don’t have a duty to research all unlikely things, but if we already are thinking about it, “it’s weird” isn’t a good/rational place to stop, unless you want to just do something else, like eat a banana or go to the park or something.
and, critically, (3) If you don’t have evidence enough to completely swamp and replace the bayesian update from weirdness points, you really don’t have enough evidence to contribute a whole lot to any search for truth. That’s what I was getting at. It’s also pretty unlikely that the weirdness that “weirdness points” refer to would be unknown to someone you’re talking with.
It might be worth emphasizing the difference between persuading people and being right. The kind of people who care about weirdness points are seldom the ones contributing good new data to any question of fact, nor those posing the best reasoning for judgments of value. I appreciate the impulse to try to convince people of things, but convincing people is extremely hard. I’m not Noam Chomsky; therefore, I have other things to do aside from thinking and arguing with people. And if I have to do one of those two worse in order to save time, I choose to dump the ‘convince people’ stat and load up on clear thinking.
Weirdness points are evidence of being wrong, since someone who holds positions different from everyone else on almost every point is probably willfully contrarian. So people who care about truth will also care about weirdness points; if someone is too weird (e.g. timecube), it is probably not worth your time listening to them.
I at least somewhat disagree with this. Weirdness is not a reliable measure of truth; in fact, I’d argue that it may even slightly anti-correlate with truth (but only slightly—it’s not like it anti-correlates so well that you’d be able to get a good picture of reality out of it by reversing it, mind you). After all, not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change. Every position that seems like common sense to us nowadays was once considered “weird” or “unusual”. So yeah, dismissing positions on the basis of weirdness alone doesn’t seem like that great of an idea; see the absurdity heuristic for further details.
Also, people often have reasons for discrediting things outside of striving for epistemic accuracy. Good people/causes can often be cast in a bad light by anyone who doesn’t like them; for instance*, RationalWiki’s article on Eliezer makes him so weird-sounding as to be absolutely cringeworthy to anyone who actually knows him, and yet plenty of people might read it and be turned off by the claims, just like they’re turned off from stuff like Time Cube.
*It is not my intention to start a flame-war or to cause a thread derailment by bringing up RW. I am aware that this sort of thing happens semi-frequently on LW, which is why I am stating my intentions here in advance. I would ask that anyone replying to this comment not stray too far from the main point, and in particular please do not bring up any RW vendettas. I am not a moderator, so obviously I have no power to enforce this request, but I do think that my request would prevent any derailment or hostility if acceded to. Thank you.
I think all three of us are right and secretly all agree.
(1) that weirdness points are bayesian evidence of being wrong (surely timecube doesn’t seem more accurate because no one believes it). Normal stuff is wrong quite a lot but not more wrong than guessing.
(2) weirdness points can never give you enough certainty to dismiss an issue completely. Time Cube is wrong because it is Time Cube (read: insane ramblings), not because it’s unpopular. Of course we don’t have a duty to research all unlikely things, but if we already are thinking about it, “it’s weird” isn’t a good/rational place to stop, unless you want to just do something else, like eat a banana or go to the park or something.
and, critically, (3) If you don’t have evidence enough to completely swamp and replace the bayesian update from weirdness points, you really don’t have enough evidence to contribute a whole lot to any search for truth. That’s what I was getting at. It’s also pretty unlikely that the weirdness that “weirdness points” refer to would be unknown to someone you’re talking with.