komponisto should not be going forward from the background probabilities because he isn’t an experienced investigator with access to the crime scene. he’s just a guy reading about evidence on the internet. a more reasonable prior for him to start with is, ″how often are people convicted of murder when they did not in fact commit a murder?″ (there are actual #s for this, too)
when juries sit around thinking, ″is this person guilty or not?″ they assume the investigators working on the case are competent. they assume, quite rightly, that there must be a damn good reason why reasonable investigators couldnt quickly dismiss a hypothesis with such an insanely low prior probability. lesswrong.com readers should do likewise.
no, it isn’t.
you’ve summarized a few of mike’s descriptive claims regarding ″how the world works″ and extrapolated mike’s probable values from those claims and how they were presented, but neither his hypotheses nor his (unstated) values have much to do with the ″thrust″ of his argument.
to paraphrase mike in the language of lesswrong: the original post is framed in such a way as to make readers think it is Obviously Obvious that being a conformist is ‘bad’ and being a non-conformist is ‘good’. Lesswrongers havent noticed because the Schelling Points offered up in the original post align very neatly with the pre-rational values Lesswrongers are most likely to have.
wrongbot’s post does not give us a reliable procedure for uncovering conflicting values. it does not tell us when we should invest time and energy trying to reconcile the conflicts we uncover. it does not tell us how to reconcile values when we decide it’s a good idea. it basically just says, ″here’s a social norm that may be constraining your behavior!” and implies (subtlely) that you should start ignoring it if you cant think of any clever reasons [that you can translate into words] why you shouldnt. how does that further the cause of Rationality?