I’m not convinced that inside view vs outside view is a well-defined distinction. You talk about the prior vs the evidence, but the process of reasoning typically involves taking some prior and then doing a bunch of separate updates on the evidence you see. Without seeing any evidence at all, my prior that any given statement is true is 50%. At what point in my process of updating on the evidence I see do I stop and say “OK, this is the outside view, all further evidence is inside view evidence”? And how do I order evidence so that “outside view” evidence comes before this point and “inside view” evidence comes after?
Perhaps the process of noticing that you might be susceptible to a bias in a particular situation should be considered logically distinct from the prior vs evidence distinction you make earlier. Well, I suppose you could argue that outside view reasoning amounts to “deleting” certain evidence that might be susceptible to a bias? (E.g. if I’m trying to estimate how long a project is going to take: Given the planning fallacy, maybe I should choose not to update on my intuitive feeling about how long the project is going to take.) It doesn’t feel to me as though this definition captures everything that people are talking about when they say “outside view”, though. Maybe splitting it in to multiple terms would be useful.
I’m not convinced that inside view vs outside view is a well-defined distinction. You talk about the prior vs the evidence, but the process of reasoning typically involves taking some prior and then doing a bunch of separate updates on the evidence you see. Without seeing any evidence at all, my prior that any given statement is true is 50%. At what point in my process of updating on the evidence I see do I stop and say “OK, this is the outside view, all further evidence is inside view evidence”? And how do I order evidence so that “outside view” evidence comes before this point and “inside view” evidence comes after?
Perhaps the process of noticing that you might be susceptible to a bias in a particular situation should be considered logically distinct from the prior vs evidence distinction you make earlier. Well, I suppose you could argue that outside view reasoning amounts to “deleting” certain evidence that might be susceptible to a bias? (E.g. if I’m trying to estimate how long a project is going to take: Given the planning fallacy, maybe I should choose not to update on my intuitive feeling about how long the project is going to take.) It doesn’t feel to me as though this definition captures everything that people are talking about when they say “outside view”, though. Maybe splitting it in to multiple terms would be useful.