I think the people who believe the vibes view are correct often have enough confidence in that position that they don’t feel a need to justify it. But it might help to give some examples:
Once in a while, I’ll see people make a strong psychological claim about large groups of people based on light personal experience. I’ll ask them why they believe this, and they tend to laugh at me, ignore me, or just say “it’s obvious”
Imo this is rarely obvious. To the extent it’s “obvious” I’ve usually found that people’s intuitions are the opposite of correct.
As a recent-ish example, it’s (commonly?) believed in some corners of the internet that EAs are unusually neurotic. When I ask for evidence of this ppl will either say it’s obvious or point to some anecdote of some specific EA being neurotic, rather than any attempt to do objective measurement.
Usually these actions are fairly normal within what I’d consider the top 1-5% of neuroticism! And these are extremely selected samples!
In fact this isn’t a situation where we have no evidence, we actually have consistent survey evidence that EAs are less neurotic than average!
Whenever I bring this up people find some other way to excuse this.
Often people assert some action or another (eg saving money, or vegetarianism) is more “white.” Often when I bothered to investigate their answers are the opposite of correct.
Politically interested people often say “the vibes” are for or against some political candidate. I just don’t see how highly selected groups of people (online or offline) are good at tracking vibes, compared to survey data.
It’s not like most politically engaged people are regularly talking to statistically representative samples of Americans!
And in fact we have pretty strong empirical evidence that aggregated polling beats almost all punditry!
Academic philosophers often claim the results of so-and-so thoughts experiments are “intuitive.” I just don’t see why, and often when people (sometimes decades later) try to replicate this by asking normal people, or philosophy students, the same questions, it gets the opposite results of what the philosophers blithely assert.
During the Altman firings it was extremely commonly asserted on the internet that the social reality went against the board and everybody supported Altman. Of course, nobody tried to do any polling.
My own intuition there was that it was an obvious/laughable psy-op. Though I don’t see a strong outside view reason to privilege my intuition over that of other people’s.
I think the people who believe the vibes view are correct often have enough confidence in that position that they don’t feel a need to justify it. But it might help to give some examples:
Once in a while, I’ll see people make a strong psychological claim about large groups of people based on light personal experience. I’ll ask them why they believe this, and they tend to laugh at me, ignore me, or just say “it’s obvious”
Imo this is rarely obvious. To the extent it’s “obvious” I’ve usually found that people’s intuitions are the opposite of correct.
As a recent-ish example, it’s (commonly?) believed in some corners of the internet that EAs are unusually neurotic. When I ask for evidence of this ppl will either say it’s obvious or point to some anecdote of some specific EA being neurotic, rather than any attempt to do objective measurement.
Usually these actions are fairly normal within what I’d consider the top 1-5% of neuroticism! And these are extremely selected samples!
In fact this isn’t a situation where we have no evidence, we actually have consistent survey evidence that EAs are less neurotic than average!
Whenever I bring this up people find some other way to excuse this.
Often people assert some action or another (eg saving money, or vegetarianism) is more “white.” Often when I bothered to investigate their answers are the opposite of correct.
Politically interested people often say “the vibes” are for or against some political candidate. I just don’t see how highly selected groups of people (online or offline) are good at tracking vibes, compared to survey data.
It’s not like most politically engaged people are regularly talking to statistically representative samples of Americans!
And in fact we have pretty strong empirical evidence that aggregated polling beats almost all punditry!
Academic philosophers often claim the results of so-and-so thoughts experiments are “intuitive.” I just don’t see why, and often when people (sometimes decades later) try to replicate this by asking normal people, or philosophy students, the same questions, it gets the opposite results of what the philosophers blithely assert.
During the Altman firings it was extremely commonly asserted on the internet that the social reality went against the board and everybody supported Altman. Of course, nobody tried to do any polling.
My own intuition there was that it was an obvious/laughable psy-op. Though I don’t see a strong outside view reason to privilege my intuition over that of other people’s.