Software Engineer. Spare time is spent building my dream 3D game from scratch.
I like philosophy.
Kieren
Karma: 2
Fun read! I was surprised that the spokesperson kept up with the conversation as well as he did 🙂
Of course there’s an Art of when to trust more in less complicated reasoning—an Art of when to pay attention to data more narrowly in a domain and less to inferences from generalizations on data from wider domains
I would like to try and expand on what that Art is. The Spokesperson is offering up an inductive argument. For an inductive argument to be any good I believe it requires something like the following.
A theory or general rule that it is attempting to establish (Bankman grows your investment 20% every year).
A sample of cases that fall under the general rule and a measure of the proportion of true cases (Bankman has grown investments in previous years).
Background knowledge establishing that the sample has been obtained through what is effectively fair and random sampling. (Less obvious that this is the case for the Bankman example).
If (1) and (3) are known implicitly from the context of the delivery of the argument, then one can get away with the virtuous, short form, empirical argument which amounts to just presenting (2). This doesn’t mean (1) and (3) don’t exist. Any of the three may be called into question and discussion would proceed from there.
E.g. If your doctor offers you the argument that medication A is preferable because it has worked for 99% of patients whilst medication B has only worked 70% of the time. In the context of the Doctors office you would be implicitly assuming that these facts were established through randomized controlled trials. Your Doctor would not need to include these details in the argument he is presenting you.
Skateboarders will often suffer from an obvious ollie hole forming on the outer toe edge of their shoes. It comes from sliding your foot up the length of the board to level it out during an ollie. I’ve used the shoe glue repair technique depicted in this video before.
Bruises and scratches on your shins and knees are a pretty good tell for when someone has been freestyle/street skating. You can tell this influencer skates besides from her username.
Less obvious tell are the roughed up sides of your jeans that comes from carrying your board around.