You can get wronger faster by using complex generators than compact generators.
… except that you have a natural immunity (well, aversion) to adopting complex generators, and a natural affinity for simple explanations. Or at least I think both of those are true of most people.
This comment feels to me like it might be dancing around saying “Hey! Don’t rape people! Make sure you are not raping people! You are saying some pretty rapey things”
Nope, that’s all coming from your expectations, not from me.
If I’d wanted to say that, I’d have said it. In fact, somebody had already said that. I actually downvoted it because I didn’t think the inference was particularly justified by the original text.
… except that you have a natural immunity (well, aversion) to adopting complex generators, and a natural affinity for simple explanations. Or at least I think both of those are true of most people.
It seems pretty important to me to distinguish between “heuristic X is worse than its inverse” and “heuristic X is better than its inverse, but less good than you think it is”.
Your top-level comment seemed to me like it was saying that a given simple explanation is less likely to be true than a given complex explanation. Here, you seem to me like you’re saying that simple explanation is more likely to be true, but people have a preference for them that is stronger than the actual effect, and so you want to push people back to having a preference that is weaker but still in the original direction.
a natural immunity (well, aversion) to adopting complex generators, and a natural affinity for simple explanations
I think this is wrong in an important way… most people find math complex, even when it describes simple things, and they find (simple) human and animal behaviours and emotions simple, even though they are some of the most complex natural phenomena I am aware of. So a more accurate statement would be “people have biases in the space of possible explanations that sometimes lead them toward overly complex explanations and sometimes lead them to overly simple explanations”.
Then we could recover your original claim that in the space of explanations of human behaviour, people are more likely to look for overly simple explanations than for overly complex explanations. But I think in explaining human behaviour people often do both, and when looking for sufficiently complex explanations, it is still true that more of them are wrong than are right.
Nope, that’s all coming from your expectations, not from me.
Right. Sorry if it caused any offence. People often seem motivated to misunderstand and condemn others, so I wouldn’t fault anyone for not wanting to say what they truly mean when discussing topics like these.
… except that you have a natural immunity (well, aversion) to adopting complex generators, and a natural affinity for simple explanations. Or at least I think both of those are true of most people.
Nope, that’s all coming from your expectations, not from me.
If I’d wanted to say that, I’d have said it. In fact, somebody had already said that. I actually downvoted it because I didn’t think the inference was particularly justified by the original text.
It seems pretty important to me to distinguish between “heuristic X is worse than its inverse” and “heuristic X is better than its inverse, but less good than you think it is”.
Your top-level comment seemed to me like it was saying that a given simple explanation is less likely to be true than a given complex explanation. Here, you seem to me like you’re saying that simple explanation is more likely to be true, but people have a preference for them that is stronger than the actual effect, and so you want to push people back to having a preference that is weaker but still in the original direction.
I think this is wrong in an important way… most people find math complex, even when it describes simple things, and they find (simple) human and animal behaviours and emotions simple, even though they are some of the most complex natural phenomena I am aware of. So a more accurate statement would be “people have biases in the space of possible explanations that sometimes lead them toward overly complex explanations and sometimes lead them to overly simple explanations”.
Then we could recover your original claim that in the space of explanations of human behaviour, people are more likely to look for overly simple explanations than for overly complex explanations. But I think in explaining human behaviour people often do both, and when looking for sufficiently complex explanations, it is still true that more of them are wrong than are right.
Right. Sorry if it caused any offence. People often seem motivated to misunderstand and condemn others, so I wouldn’t fault anyone for not wanting to say what they truly mean when discussing topics like these.