I’m not sure what you are trying to argue here?
I am saying that trying to use a reference class prediction in a situation where you don’t have many examples of what you are referencing is a bad idea and will likely result in a flawed prediction.
You should only try and use the Outside View if you are in a situation that you have been in over and over and over again, with the same concrete results.
… then the data is most likely insufficient for reasoning in any other way
If you are using an Outside View to do reasoning and inference than I don’t know what to say other than, you’re doing it wrong.
If you are presented with a question about a post-singularity world, and the only admissible evidence (reference class) is
the class of instances of the human mind attempting to think and act outside of its epistemologically nurturing environment of clear feedback from everyday activities.
I’m sorry, but I am not going to trust any conclusion you draw. That is a really small class to draw from, small enough that we could probably name each instance individually.
I don’t care how smart the person is. If they are assigning probabilities from sparse data, it is just guessing. And if they are smart, they should know better than to call it anything else.
There have been no repeated trials of singularities with consistent unquestionable results. This is not like procrastinating students and shoppers, or estimations in software.
Without enough data, you are more likely to invent a reference class than anything else.
I think the Outside View is only useful when your predictions for a specific event have been repeatedly wrong, and the the actual outcome is consistent. The point of the technique is to correct for a bias. I would like to know that I actually have a bias before correcting it. And, I’d like to know which way to correct.
I’m not sure what you are trying to argue here? I am saying that trying to use a reference class prediction in a situation where you don’t have many examples of what you are referencing is a bad idea and will likely result in a flawed prediction.
You should only try and use the Outside View if you are in a situation that you have been in over and over and over again, with the same concrete results.
If you are presented with a question about a post-singularity world, and the only admissible evidence (reference class) is
I’m sorry, but I am not going to trust any conclusion you draw. That is a really small class to draw from, small enough that we could probably name each instance individually. I don’t care how smart the person is. If they are assigning probabilities from sparse data, it is just guessing. And if they are smart, they should know better than to call it anything else.
There have been no repeated trials of singularities with consistent unquestionable results. This is not like procrastinating students and shoppers, or estimations in software. Without enough data, you are more likely to invent a reference class than anything else.
I think the Outside View is only useful when your predictions for a specific event have been repeatedly wrong, and the the actual outcome is consistent. The point of the technique is to correct for a bias. I would like to know that I actually have a bias before correcting it. And, I’d like to know which way to correct.
Edit: formatting