I appreciate the sentiment here, but I feel like it’s lacking something. Something like I can’t really agree or disagree with it: I feel like this is telling a just-so story that could be right but that I also can’t really find much opportunity to prove wrong (yes, there is some straightforward things to test; I mean this as more within the reference class of things this is aiming to explain and forecast). It doesn’t say enough or give us enough reason to believe in a “law of cultural proximity” beyond some vague intuition that this seems roughly what the world looks like.
Basically I’d like to see posts on LW that point more to evidence rather than isolated reasoning within a model that might or might not be relevant to understanding the real world.
This is good feedback, thank you. I found it hard to write this post for this exact reason—it seems obviously true, but there aren’t any good studies or natural experiments to point to. Perhaps it would have been better framed as a hypothesis in need of validation? Though I fear it feels too obvious for that, and nobody would be interested in validating it.
I appreciate the sentiment here, but I feel like it’s lacking something. Something like I can’t really agree or disagree with it: I feel like this is telling a just-so story that could be right but that I also can’t really find much opportunity to prove wrong (yes, there is some straightforward things to test; I mean this as more within the reference class of things this is aiming to explain and forecast). It doesn’t say enough or give us enough reason to believe in a “law of cultural proximity” beyond some vague intuition that this seems roughly what the world looks like.
Basically I’d like to see posts on LW that point more to evidence rather than isolated reasoning within a model that might or might not be relevant to understanding the real world.
This is good feedback, thank you. I found it hard to write this post for this exact reason—it seems obviously true, but there aren’t any good studies or natural experiments to point to. Perhaps it would have been better framed as a hypothesis in need of validation? Though I fear it feels too obvious for that, and nobody would be interested in validating it.