Is the idea here to counsel us against some sort of halo effect? Eliezer Yudkowsky has told me a lot of interesting things about heuristics and biases, and about how intelligence works, but I shouldn’t let this affect my judgement too much if he recommends a movie?
Or is it more than that—just that I should be careful when reading anything by Eliezer, and take into account the fact that I’m probably slightly too inclined to trust it, because I’ve liked what came before? Because then of course, we have the issue that I should be more likely to trust an author who is usually right—and this just says that I should be careful not to trust them too much more.
For much of what EY is setting out, trust isn’t an appropriate relationship to have with it. You trust that he’s not misrepresenting the research or his knowledge of it, and you have a certain confidence that it will be interesting, so if an article doesn’t seem rewarding at first you’re more likely to put work in to squeeze the goodness out. But most of it is about making an argument for something, so the caution is not to trust it at all but to properly evaluate its merits. To trust it would be to fail to understand it.
“Because then of course, we have the issue that I should be more likely to trust an author who is usually right—and this just says that I should be careful not to trust them too much more.”
Is the idea here to counsel us against some sort of halo effect? Eliezer Yudkowsky has told me a lot of interesting things about heuristics and biases, and about how intelligence works, but I shouldn’t let this affect my judgement too much if he recommends a movie?
Or is it more than that—just that I should be careful when reading anything by Eliezer, and take into account the fact that I’m probably slightly too inclined to trust it, because I’ve liked what came before? Because then of course, we have the issue that I should be more likely to trust an author who is usually right—and this just says that I should be careful not to trust them too much more.
For much of what EY is setting out, trust isn’t an appropriate relationship to have with it. You trust that he’s not misrepresenting the research or his knowledge of it, and you have a certain confidence that it will be interesting, so if an article doesn’t seem rewarding at first you’re more likely to put work in to squeeze the goodness out. But most of it is about making an argument for something, so the caution is not to trust it at all but to properly evaluate its merits. To trust it would be to fail to understand it.
“Because then of course, we have the issue that I should be more likely to trust an author who is usually right—and this just says that I should be careful not to trust them too much more.”
Right.