The findings on the efficacy of medicine that Robin Hanson often mentions sound like a good example. Most people would guess that the conclusions of the RAND study are obviously correct if presented in inverted form.
But more importantly, if you have such difficulty finding good examples, could this perhaps be an indication that your claim is more shaky than you’d like it to be?
One of the worst tendencies I notice in my own argumentation when I get carried away is precisely the sort of error you might be making here. Namely, sometimes I state a general claim that wouldn’t really hold under scrutiny, and then think long and hard until I find an example that fits especially well to support it. This even though in the process, I think through a bunch of situations that represent at least a partial counterexample to my claim, but I never mention those.
In this case, the fact that you have such difficulty finding examples where hindsight devalues social science findings suggests that this doesn’t happen as often as you’d like to imply.
if you have such difficulty finding good examples, could this perhaps be an indication that your claim is more shaky than you’d like it to be?
Could be, though my first thought on the difficulty of finding suggestions was “I guess the brain doesn’t index its knowledge on ‘is_invertible_fact’.” And of course, hindsight bias interferes with the search process—the facts one knows seem correct and well-supported.
I thought Eliezer was looking for statements which would make his readers experience hindsight bias upon reading them, which is more of a challenge than simply finding examples of hindsight bias.
The findings on the efficacy of medicine that Robin Hanson often mentions sound like a good example. Most people would guess that the conclusions of the RAND study are obviously correct if presented in inverted form.
But more importantly, if you have such difficulty finding good examples, could this perhaps be an indication that your claim is more shaky than you’d like it to be?
One of the worst tendencies I notice in my own argumentation when I get carried away is precisely the sort of error you might be making here. Namely, sometimes I state a general claim that wouldn’t really hold under scrutiny, and then think long and hard until I find an example that fits especially well to support it. This even though in the process, I think through a bunch of situations that represent at least a partial counterexample to my claim, but I never mention those.
In this case, the fact that you have such difficulty finding examples where hindsight devalues social science findings suggests that this doesn’t happen as often as you’d like to imply.
But isn’t the aim here to find claims that are obviously correct in both directions?
Could be, though my first thought on the difficulty of finding suggestions was “I guess the brain doesn’t index its knowledge on ‘is_invertible_fact’.” And of course, hindsight bias interferes with the search process—the facts one knows seem correct and well-supported.
I thought Eliezer was looking for statements which would make his readers experience hindsight bias upon reading them, which is more of a challenge than simply finding examples of hindsight bias.