I feel bad about being in the “tone police” role here,
I’m more objected to Benquo’s comment on grounds of it being false, or at least not engaging with what Sinclair obviously meant, than about tone. [edit: er, I guess I also think that giving a false dichotomy to make a point seem persuasive seems to fall under “deception” rather than tone and I don’t think you need to bring tone into the question to object to the comment].
I do think a pretty valuable I’ve gotten a lot from Benquo over the years has been reframings of things in ways that make me engage with something that my natural frame glossed over. But, in this case I think his implied point just… doesn’t seem logically valid and is kinda offtopic? Or at least he hasn’t made the case for it. (I think “maybe she’s a good judge of character?” is still missing the point of what Sinclair pretty obviously meant. If the base rates are low, the dice coming up negative isn’t a very interesting outcome in the first place and you shouldn’t be updating [edit] much [/edit] from a single instance)
(I separately think Robert’s comment wasn’t very good either, doesn’t quite check out even as a clever quip, and he probably should have resisted the urge to get partial credit for “not being clever”)
I am, to be clear, actively interested in Benquo engaging with the base rates question and explaining why his frame here is useful in spite of that background fact.
Yeah true, but I’d reword as “shouldn’t be updating much from a single instance”, and I think concretely it shouldn’t be enough of an update to substantially privilege hypotheses like “Sinclair is making some kind of cognitive error here”.
(My actual guess is that Benquo has a background frame/hypothesis like “People frequently underweight their own personal intuitions over statistics [or, vaguely assumed ‘statistics’ that they probably don’t even have a citation for and if they looked up the study it might not even say what they thought it said].” And, like, I totally think this might be true and relevant and worth having privileged anyway, but I don’t think Sinclair’s anecdote is evidence for or particularly illustrative of it)
I’m more objected to Benquo’s comment on grounds of it being false, or at least not engaging with what Sinclair obviously meant, than about tone. [edit: er, I guess I also think that giving a false dichotomy to make a point seem persuasive seems to fall under “deception” rather than tone and I don’t think you need to bring tone into the question to object to the comment].
I do think a pretty valuable I’ve gotten a lot from Benquo over the years has been reframings of things in ways that make me engage with something that my natural frame glossed over. But, in this case I think his implied point just… doesn’t seem logically valid and is kinda offtopic? Or at least he hasn’t made the case for it. (I think “maybe she’s a good judge of character?” is still missing the point of what Sinclair pretty obviously meant. If the base rates are low, the dice coming up negative isn’t a very interesting outcome in the first place and you shouldn’t be updating [edit] much [/edit] from a single instance)
(I separately think Robert’s comment wasn’t very good either, doesn’t quite check out even as a clever quip, and he probably should have resisted the urge to get partial credit for “not being clever”)
I am, to be clear, actively interested in Benquo engaging with the base rates question and explaining why his frame here is useful in spite of that background fact.
Quantitatively small updates are still updates!
Yeah true, but I’d reword as “shouldn’t be updating much from a single instance”, and I think concretely it shouldn’t be enough of an update to substantially privilege hypotheses like “Sinclair is making some kind of cognitive error here”.
(My actual guess is that Benquo has a background frame/hypothesis like “People frequently underweight their own personal intuitions over statistics [or, vaguely assumed ‘statistics’ that they probably don’t even have a citation for and if they looked up the study it might not even say what they thought it said].” And, like, I totally think this might be true and relevant and worth having privileged anyway, but I don’t think Sinclair’s anecdote is evidence for or particularly illustrative of it)