That’s just what Eliezer is pointing at with “Choosing to be Biased”. In practice, it’s impossible to determine causality between beliefs and “success”. There are lots of successful people with all kinds of utterly insane beliefs. Were their insane beliefs the cause of their success? Or were these people so talented that they were able to achieve success despite those beliefs?
In contrast, determining whether a belief results in good predictions about the world is quite easy, and gets you many of the benefits without any of the potentially catastrophic costs.
That’s just what Eliezer is pointing at with “Choosing to be Biased”. In practice, it’s impossible to determine causality between beliefs and “success”. There are lots of successful people with all kinds of utterly insane beliefs. Were their insane beliefs the cause of their success? Or were these people so talented that they were able to achieve success despite those beliefs?
In contrast, determining whether a belief results in good predictions about the world is quite easy, and gets you many of the benefits without any of the potentially catastrophic costs.
This makes me wonder. Does it mean we can’t determine if true beliefs cause success either? Or is there some important asymmetry?