That said, FYI I was kind of enlightened by this phrasing:
That is, in the multiple stage fallacy, someone who wishes to portray a proposition as unlikely can prey on people’s reluctance to assign extreme probabilities by spuriously representing the proposition as a conjunction of sub-propositions that all need to be true.
I’d been feeling sus about why the multiple stage fallacy was even a fallacy at all, apart from “somehow in practice people fuck it up.” Multiplying probabilities together is… like, how else are you supposed to do any kind of sophisticated reasoning?
But, “because people are scared of (or bad at) assigning extreme probabilities” feels like it explains it to me.
That said, FYI I was kind of enlightened by this phrasing:
I’d been feeling sus about why the multiple stage fallacy was even a fallacy at all, apart from “somehow in practice people fuck it up.” Multiplying probabilities together is… like, how else are you supposed to do any kind of sophisticated reasoning?
But, “because people are scared of (or bad at) assigning extreme probabilities” feels like it explains it to me.