OK thats a pretty narrow reference class. For example I am not even from USA so I wouldn’t choose it or be convinced by it would I? Seeing as >95% of the world dont live in the USA it’s not going to convince them.
And if you expand it, then Putin and many dictators start off being at least somewhat democratically elected. Conformity with conventions, is also pretty vague, like being ridiculous is seen as more unlikely than being a dictator? This all seems a bit arbitrary and post hoc.
Well, I am an immigrant from the Soviet Union to the United States, and for me the evidence is strong. And about Putin being “democratically elected”, at least initially, I… well, “politics is a mind-killer”, so I am not going to expand in this direction ;-) But he was relatively normal, he was not a weird outlier (even with what’s going on now; it’s very unpleasant, but it’s not strange, it’s “traditionally bad”). So he would not be a counter-example.
But I don’t claim that the evidence is universal. (In some sense, the whole point of having this many people is to maintain a healthy diversity and non-uniformity of views. After all, certainties are rare, and here we are not discussing a subject where one would expect certainty, so why would one aim for a universal evidence here… The discussion here is whether it’s reasonable for some rationalists to update based on this, not whether it’s a “cognitive sin” not to update.)
If you look at my initial comment, I am not even saying that I should update. All I am saying is that this is an extra motivation to try to evaluate whether the overall level of weirdness is above of what should be expected of a “naturalistic reality”.
OK thats a pretty narrow reference class. For example I am not even from USA so I wouldn’t choose it or be convinced by it would I? Seeing as >95% of the world dont live in the USA it’s not going to convince them.
And if you expand it, then Putin and many dictators start off being at least somewhat democratically elected. Conformity with conventions, is also pretty vague, like being ridiculous is seen as more unlikely than being a dictator? This all seems a bit arbitrary and post hoc.
Well, I am an immigrant from the Soviet Union to the United States, and for me the evidence is strong. And about Putin being “democratically elected”, at least initially, I… well, “politics is a mind-killer”, so I am not going to expand in this direction ;-) But he was relatively normal, he was not a weird outlier (even with what’s going on now; it’s very unpleasant, but it’s not strange, it’s “traditionally bad”). So he would not be a counter-example.
But I don’t claim that the evidence is universal. (In some sense, the whole point of having this many people is to maintain a healthy diversity and non-uniformity of views. After all, certainties are rare, and here we are not discussing a subject where one would expect certainty, so why would one aim for a universal evidence here… The discussion here is whether it’s reasonable for some rationalists to update based on this, not whether it’s a “cognitive sin” not to update.)
If you look at my initial comment, I am not even saying that I should update. All I am saying is that this is an extra motivation to try to evaluate whether the overall level of weirdness is above of what should be expected of a “naturalistic reality”.