I’ve got a question which might be a bit galaxy brained which goes something like: If you start looking for a straight line on a graph aren’t you gonna delude yourself because you’re a stupid monkey?
Doubling down on this, if you join the straight line group then all the other people around you will show you the evidence of the straight line and start to dismiss the evidence of the sigmoiding?
I’ve got some sort of alarms firing in my head going like “the local environment seems like it leads to bad epistemics, care, care!” and so I’ve adapted the very elusive (and in reality non-existent) centrist position of saying “if it happens it happens, the stuff I work on is robust to timelines” and then actually having a model in the background but not being public about it. (which includes straight line arguments)
So uhhh, I’m taking all evidence into account and it may or may not be true in a very hypothetical world...
It’s probably helpful to actually look at evidence and not solely rely on your prior, yes.
Part of the point of my comment is to suggest that “trend continues with some high probability”, and the “trend breaks tomorrow” should be the exception, rather than “”trend breaks tomorrow” should be the default outcome, with “trend continues tomorrow” being the unlikely edge case.
But I agree there are adverse selection effects. If you go around looking for “interesting” straight lines on graphs you are disproportionately likely to trick yourself by bad data and/or the one trend that’s more likely to break (because they’re selected to be interesting).
I’ve got a question which might be a bit galaxy brained which goes something like: If you start looking for a straight line on a graph aren’t you gonna delude yourself because you’re a stupid monkey?
Doubling down on this, if you join the straight line group then all the other people around you will show you the evidence of the straight line and start to dismiss the evidence of the sigmoiding?
I’ve got some sort of alarms firing in my head going like “the local environment seems like it leads to bad epistemics, care, care!” and so I’ve adapted the very elusive (and in reality non-existent) centrist position of saying “if it happens it happens, the stuff I work on is robust to timelines” and then actually having a model in the background but not being public about it. (which includes straight line arguments)
So uhhh, I’m taking all evidence into account and it may or may not be true in a very hypothetical world...
It’s probably helpful to actually look at evidence and not solely rely on your prior, yes.
Part of the point of my comment is to suggest that “trend continues with some high probability”, and the “trend breaks tomorrow” should be the exception, rather than “”trend breaks tomorrow” should be the default outcome, with “trend continues tomorrow” being the unlikely edge case.
But I agree there are adverse selection effects. If you go around looking for “interesting” straight lines on graphs you are disproportionately likely to trick yourself by bad data and/or the one trend that’s more likely to break (because they’re selected to be interesting).