You should not err on the side of caution if you are a Bayesian expectation-maximizer!
But I think what you’re getting at, which is the important thing, is that people say “Assume X” when they really mean “My computation of the expected value times probability over all possible outcomes indicates X is likely, and I’m too lazy to remember the details, or I think you’re too stupid to do the computation right; so I’m just going to cache ‘assume X’ and repeat that from now on”. They ruin their analysis because they’re lazy, and don’t want to do more analysis than they would need to do in order to decide what action to take if they had to make the choice today. Then the lazy analysis done with poor information becomes dogma. As in the example above.
Instead of downvoting a comment for referring to another comment that you disagree with, I think you should downvote the original comment.
Better yet, explain why you downvoted. Explaining what you downvoted is going halfway, so I half-appreciate it.
I can’t express strongly enough my dismay that here, on a forum where people are allegedly devoted to rationality, they still strongly believe in making some assumptions without justification.
The erring on the side of caution only enters when you have to make a decision. Your pre-action estimate should be clean of this.
You should not err on the side of caution if you are a Bayesian expectation-maximizer!
But I think what you’re getting at, which is the important thing, is that people say “Assume X” when they really mean “My computation of the expected value times probability over all possible outcomes indicates X is likely, and I’m too lazy to remember the details, or I think you’re too stupid to do the computation right; so I’m just going to cache ‘assume X’ and repeat that from now on”. They ruin their analysis because they’re lazy, and don’t want to do more analysis than they would need to do in order to decide what action to take if they had to make the choice today. Then the lazy analysis done with poor information becomes dogma. As in the example above.
I downvoted this sentence.
Instead of downvoting a comment for referring to another comment that you disagree with, I think you should downvote the original comment.
Better yet, explain why you downvoted. Explaining what you downvoted is going halfway, so I half-appreciate it.
I can’t express strongly enough my dismay that here, on a forum where people are allegedly devoted to rationality, they still strongly believe in making some assumptions without justification.
Weasel words used to convey unnecessary insult.