If I see an Amazon / eBay / etc. review page with a bunch of reviews that say “instead of office chair, package contained bobcat”, my immediate assumption will be that a competitor of the seller has paid for a bunch of bad reviews.
This sort of thing happens regularly.
More generally, given a heuristic that you would apply to a situation, ask: who can profit by exploiting that heuristic. If such people exist, then assume that they are already exploiting your heuristic.
The task, then, is to determine whether bobcatters are more or less common than unscrupulous sellers who would pay for fake reviews that accuse their competitors of being bobcatters.
Thus also in social situations.
Determining and comparing respective base rates is not trivial, but without assuming that adversarial optimization exists, you will predictably fail to get the right answer, quite often. (Increasingly often, in fact, due to incentives.)
I’m trying to point at something loosely in this vicinity in section V, about hunting in packs—replace “one of them has three good friends” with “one of them paid three people”—where sometimes a bunch of negative reports are happening because someone is making up or deeply exaggerating accusations and routing them to you through different sources. I don’t know that it’s my first assumption; I currently think “Erin is mailing metaphorical bobcats to a small number of people” happens more often than “Frank is coordinating a bunch of fake or exaggerated accusations about Erin.” I do think the latter happens sometimes though.
Conservation of expected evidence, if I see an Amazon review page with reviews saying “instead of office chair, package contained bobcat” my odds they’re sending bobcats did go up at least somewhat. How much depends on things like how outlandish the actual accusation is and how coordinated the reviews look.
I strongly agree that adversarial optimization exists and is an important factor in these kinds of social situations. I’ve been thinking about and writing about social conflict a lot lately in large part because the sometimes adversarial nature of it makes this harder in many ways than most parts of running good meetups. Many (most?) problems you can fix and they stay fixed, and if you’re stuck you can ask the people around you. That doesn’t work as well for social conflict.
Conservation of expected evidence, if I see an Amazon review page with reviews saying “instead of office chair, package contained bobcat” my odds they’re sending bobcats did go up at least somewhat.
If I see an Amazon / eBay / etc. review page with a bunch of reviews that say “instead of office chair, package contained bobcat”, my immediate assumption will be that a competitor of the seller has paid for a bunch of bad reviews.
This sort of thing happens regularly.
More generally, given a heuristic that you would apply to a situation, ask: who can profit by exploiting that heuristic. If such people exist, then assume that they are already exploiting your heuristic.
The task, then, is to determine whether bobcatters are more or less common than unscrupulous sellers who would pay for fake reviews that accuse their competitors of being bobcatters.
Thus also in social situations.
Determining and comparing respective base rates is not trivial, but without assuming that adversarial optimization exists, you will predictably fail to get the right answer, quite often. (Increasingly often, in fact, due to incentives.)
Somewhat agreed.
I’m trying to point at something loosely in this vicinity in section V, about hunting in packs—replace “one of them has three good friends” with “one of them paid three people”—where sometimes a bunch of negative reports are happening because someone is making up or deeply exaggerating accusations and routing them to you through different sources. I don’t know that it’s my first assumption; I currently think “Erin is mailing metaphorical bobcats to a small number of people” happens more often than “Frank is coordinating a bunch of fake or exaggerated accusations about Erin.” I do think the latter happens sometimes though.
Conservation of expected evidence, if I see an Amazon review page with reviews saying “instead of office chair, package contained bobcat” my odds they’re sending bobcats did go up at least somewhat. How much depends on things like how outlandish the actual accusation is and how coordinated the reviews look.
I strongly agree that adversarial optimization exists and is an important factor in these kinds of social situations. I’ve been thinking about and writing about social conflict a lot lately in large part because the sometimes adversarial nature of it makes this harder in many ways than most parts of running good meetups. Many (most?) problems you can fix and they stay fixed, and if you’re stuck you can ask the people around you. That doesn’t work as well for social conflict.
Yes, of course. But your odds that it’s a competitor’s plot should also go up—and will end up higher by far. (This is one of the myriad examples of what Jaynes called the “resurrection of dead hypotheses”.)