Eliezer’s account seems to be the one in his inflation target FAQ. In the above post, though, Eliezer isn’t claiming to know of any strong reason for the Bank of Japan to be behaving this way; he’s saying that the obvious incentives favoring competence aren’t so strong that they allow us to make confident predictions one way or the other. He’s sufficiently uncertain at the outset about how good their decision-making will be that he can take local evidence of poor decision-making more or less at face value, even without knowing the specifics of why they’re behaving in this particular way.
The key decisionmakers at the Bank of Japan might been vulnerable to any number of ideological commitments or epistemic missteps. They might have had respected colleagues or friends whose beliefs or esteem they especially valued, and who happened to skew toward bad views of monetary policy. It’s surprising if someone is willing to forgo large financial incentives in order to look good to a handful of friends at dinner parties, but it’s not so surprising if someone is willing to forgo looking good to one group of people in order to look good to another group.
Eliezer’s account seems to be the one in his inflation target FAQ. In the above post, though, Eliezer isn’t claiming to know of any strong reason for the Bank of Japan to be behaving this way; he’s saying that the obvious incentives favoring competence aren’t so strong that they allow us to make confident predictions one way or the other. He’s sufficiently uncertain at the outset about how good their decision-making will be that he can take local evidence of poor decision-making more or less at face value, even without knowing the specifics of why they’re behaving in this particular way.
The key decisionmakers at the Bank of Japan might been vulnerable to any number of ideological commitments or epistemic missteps. They might have had respected colleagues or friends whose beliefs or esteem they especially valued, and who happened to skew toward bad views of monetary policy. It’s surprising if someone is willing to forgo large financial incentives in order to look good to a handful of friends at dinner parties, but it’s not so surprising if someone is willing to forgo looking good to one group of people in order to look good to another group.