Meta: There are many correct answers to this question and I’m sure Less Wrong folk will give at least five or ten. However, I’ve noticed that Less Wrong folk don’t seem to be much better than other reasonably smart people at noticing which causal factors contribute most to an outcome when there are many plausible causal factors. Insofar as my perception is evidence this might be a good thing to keep in mind. (Representative datum: The ridiculous number of hypothesis-like-things that attempted to explain large swaths of “akrasia”. One should be pretty damn suspicious when ones explanation posits that a single causal factor largely explains the lack of a complex thing.)
Could it be that the whole business about causal factors is just a pretense to tell everyone about how virtuous you are in being ready to admit you’re wrong and to commiserate about how most people aren’t as virtous?
Is the “you” in your comment singular? I can’t tell. If so, I don’t see how an answer to that question would be pragmatically discovered or particularly informative.
I tried to remain agnostic; on the meta level it could be that 20% of choices of distribution account for 80% of my consternation caused by choices of distribution, or that I am optimizing my message to influence the 20% of people who make 80% of such errors instead of the general Less Wrong populace. I’m advocating a decision policy, much of the epistemic support is swept into the “insofar as my perception is evidence” clause. I can’t easily reflect on the intuitive calculus that my brain does to determine the utility of collecting or propagating certain information given many sources of uncertainty.
Meta: There are many correct answers to this question and I’m sure Less Wrong folk will give at least five or ten. However, I’ve noticed that Less Wrong folk don’t seem to be much better than other reasonably smart people at noticing which causal factors contribute most to an outcome when there are many plausible causal factors. Insofar as my perception is evidence this might be a good thing to keep in mind. (Representative datum: The ridiculous number of hypothesis-like-things that attempted to explain large swaths of “akrasia”. One should be pretty damn suspicious when ones explanation posits that a single causal factor largely explains the lack of a complex thing.)
Could it be that the whole business about causal factors is just a pretense to tell everyone about how virtuous you are in being ready to admit you’re wrong and to commiserate about how most people aren’t as virtous?
Is the “you” in your comment singular? I can’t tell. If so, I don’t see how an answer to that question would be pragmatically discovered or particularly informative.
Um, I guess it’s the “you” and you use as an informal “one”.
So you’re saying the pareto principle heuristic isn’t good for those kinds of situations? That makes some sense, I suppose.
I tried to remain agnostic; on the meta level it could be that 20% of choices of distribution account for 80% of my consternation caused by choices of distribution, or that I am optimizing my message to influence the 20% of people who make 80% of such errors instead of the general Less Wrong populace. I’m advocating a decision policy, much of the epistemic support is swept into the “insofar as my perception is evidence” clause. I can’t easily reflect on the intuitive calculus that my brain does to determine the utility of collecting or propagating certain information given many sources of uncertainty.