I think this comes down to many things, including Eliezer’s history of calibration in such situations, and the state of such institutions in general. In this case I think Jack was being quite fair to think that given what he knew about Eliezer, and his knowledge of Japan at the time, on average Eliezer was being overconfident here.
But that’s a calibration question as opposed to a question of whether it is generally reasonable for a person such as Eliezer to think that BoJ could be doing something insane, or what evidence Eliezer would need before being able to claim that.
To that, I would strongly answer that it is very reasonable to think BoJ could be doing something insane in this spot, it’s just a question of how much evidence you have and how confident you should be, even before we learn that actually it is consensus reality among economists and traders not in BoJ that BoJ is acting insane.
I’d also make the argument that the very fact that everyone thinks BoJ was doing something insane, and it turned out to have done something insane, is evidence that institutions like the BoJ do insane things. Not only do they do insane things, they often don’t fix them even when everyone is telling them their actions are insane.
Obviously this is one non-random example, so it isn’t that strong as evidence on its own, but the class of thing “seemingly insane thing being done by major institution that people told them was insane, they eventually fixed, and that then turned out to be insane” is reasonably large.
At a minimum such institutions strongly disagree with the argument from modesty, in the sense that they seem to believe things that the outside world tells them are wrong, quite often. Using the argument from modesty, to believe decisions made by groups and institutions that are disrespecting the argument from modesty, is at least highly weird. Why trust a group to make better decisions than you, when they’re using a worse rule to make their decisions?
I think this comes down to many things, including Eliezer’s history of calibration in such situations, and the state of such institutions in general. In this case I think Jack was being quite fair to think that given what he knew about Eliezer, and his knowledge of Japan at the time, on average Eliezer was being overconfident here.
But that’s a calibration question as opposed to a question of whether it is generally reasonable for a person such as Eliezer to think that BoJ could be doing something insane, or what evidence Eliezer would need before being able to claim that.
To that, I would strongly answer that it is very reasonable to think BoJ could be doing something insane in this spot, it’s just a question of how much evidence you have and how confident you should be, even before we learn that actually it is consensus reality among economists and traders not in BoJ that BoJ is acting insane.
I’d also make the argument that the very fact that everyone thinks BoJ was doing something insane, and it turned out to have done something insane, is evidence that institutions like the BoJ do insane things. Not only do they do insane things, they often don’t fix them even when everyone is telling them their actions are insane.
Obviously this is one non-random example, so it isn’t that strong as evidence on its own, but the class of thing “seemingly insane thing being done by major institution that people told them was insane, they eventually fixed, and that then turned out to be insane” is reasonably large.
At a minimum such institutions strongly disagree with the argument from modesty, in the sense that they seem to believe things that the outside world tells them are wrong, quite often. Using the argument from modesty, to believe decisions made by groups and institutions that are disrespecting the argument from modesty, is at least highly weird. Why trust a group to make better decisions than you, when they’re using a worse rule to make their decisions?