I feel my view is weakest in cases where there is a strong upside to disregarding elite common sense, there is little downside, and you’ll find out whether your bet against conventional wisdom was right within a tolerable time limit. Perhaps many crazy-sounding entrepreneurial ideas and scientific hypotheses fit this description.
It doesn’t look too hard to fold these scenarios into the framework. Elite common sense tends to update in light of valid novel arguments, but this updating is slow. So if you’re in possession of a novel argument you often don’t want to wait the years required to find out if it’s accepted; you can stress test it by checking whether elite common sense thinks there’s any plausibility in the argument, and if so let it nudge your beliefs a bit. If there’s a high upside and low downside to acting in the way suggested by the argument, it may not need to change your beliefs by very much before it’s correct to act on the new idea.
Or am I distorting what you intended by the framework here?
It doesn’t look too hard to fold these scenarios into the framework. Elite common sense tends to update in light of valid novel arguments, but this updating is slow. So if you’re in possession of a novel argument you often don’t want to wait the years required to find out if it’s accepted; you can stress test it by checking whether elite common sense thinks there’s any plausibility in the argument, and if so let it nudge your beliefs a bit. If there’s a high upside and low downside to acting in the way suggested by the argument, it may not need to change your beliefs by very much before it’s correct to act on the new idea.
Or am I distorting what you intended by the framework here?
This sounds right to me.