What if I tried putting it this way: people underestimate the (potential) power of applying rationality techniques as compared with gathering more raw information. It is sometimes possible to be extremely confident about a proposition after an hour of Internet research, even when people who have spent a year “gathering evidence” seem to disagree sharply.
Totally agree, and that’s a point that you explained convincingly in your post. Just so long as I don’t have to quantise ‘extremely confident’ as 0.999. Although given an hour and also given that the lesswrong.com discussion is now part of ‘the Internet’, I expect I would break the 0.99 mark at least.
Totally agree, and that’s a point that you explained convincingly in your post. Just so long as I don’t have to quantise ‘extremely confident’ as 0.999. Although given an hour and also given that the lesswrong.com discussion is now part of ‘the Internet’, I expect I would break the 0.99 mark at least.