I’m not sure if your comment is disagreeing with any of this. It sounds like we’re on the same page about the fact that exact reasoning is prohibitively costly, and so you will be reasoning approximately, will often miss things, etc.
I agree. The term I’ve heard to describe this state is “violent agreement”.
so in practice wrong conclusions are almost always due to a combination of both “not knowing enough” and “not thinking hard enough” / “not being smart enough.”
The only thing I was trying to point out (maybe more so for everyone else reading the commentary than for you specifically) is that it is perfectly rational for an actor to “not think hard enough” about some problem and thus arrive at a wrong conclusion (or correct conclusion but for a wrong reason), because that actor has higher priority items requiring their attention, and that puts hard time constraints on how many cycles they can dedicate to lower priority items, e.g. debating AC efficiency. Rational actors will try to minimize the likelihood that they’ve reached a wrong conclusion, but they’ll also be forced to minimize or at least not exceed some limit on allowed computation cycles, and on most problems that means the computation cost + any type of hard time constraint is going to be the actual limiting factor.
Although even that, I think that’s more or less what you meant by
in some sense you’ve probably spent too long thinking about the question relative to doing something else
In engineering R&D we often do a bunch of upfront thinking at the start of a project, and the goal is to identify where we have uncertainty or risk in our proposed design. Then, rather than spend 2 more months in meetings debating back-and-forth who has done the napkin math correctly, we’ll take the things we’re uncertain about and design prototypes to burn down risk directly.
I agree. The term I’ve heard to describe this state is “violent agreement”.
The only thing I was trying to point out (maybe more so for everyone else reading the commentary than for you specifically) is that it is perfectly rational for an actor to “not think hard enough” about some problem and thus arrive at a wrong conclusion (or correct conclusion but for a wrong reason), because that actor has higher priority items requiring their attention, and that puts hard time constraints on how many cycles they can dedicate to lower priority items, e.g. debating AC efficiency. Rational actors will try to minimize the likelihood that they’ve reached a wrong conclusion, but they’ll also be forced to minimize or at least not exceed some limit on allowed computation cycles, and on most problems that means the computation cost + any type of hard time constraint is going to be the actual limiting factor.
Although even that, I think that’s more or less what you meant by
In engineering R&D we often do a bunch of upfront thinking at the start of a project, and the goal is to identify where we have uncertainty or risk in our proposed design. Then, rather than spend 2 more months in meetings debating back-and-forth who has done the napkin math correctly, we’ll take the things we’re uncertain about and design prototypes to burn down risk directly.