Social desirability is a big one, thanks, I didn’t think of that.
A related issue is that every representation we see of reality—every newspaper, blog, TV show, movie—is created by a writer or artist, definitionally. So when we look at representations of the world, we’re looking at the biased viewpoint of the highly verbal and well-educated. And, of course, these are not all the people. If you live in a highly symbolic/representational world, you may be very mistaken about how things work, not only because of a particular bias in your bubble of representations, but because of a systematic bias in all representations.
(I think Tolstoy is an unusually valuable resource because he writes about the inner lives of the kind of people who would never, ever write or talk about their inner lives.)
Social desirability bias is a part of this—it biases what we believe towards what people are willing to talk about—but I think the entire phenomenon is worth thinking about.
First of all, I think anecdotal evidence from personal experience with people IRL is always extraordinarily compelling. When, for instance, I go onsite with a client, or when I go to a workshop and do research with people, I feel that I’ve been vastly more productive per hour than I am when I’m on my own. The standard startup advice is always “talk to customers/users.” Talking face to face with the people who do a thing has outsized power in teaching you about the thing.
On the other hand, some of this impression can be illusion. Social reality is strong. Being around people IRL might make you feel like you’re learning a lot very fast, but it might just be fairy glamor. Eyewitness accounts are famously unreliable testimony in court.
Basically, how much is it right to update on “I met some people who actually worked on national security, and I tried doing national-security stuff with them, and believe me, it is very serious and very hard and Trump would fuck it up”? How valuable is Eliezer’s eyewitness testimony?
I think eyewitness testimony is probably one of the important correctives to news and polls and opinion pieces—data is better than analysis on the margin, especially if you have reason not to trust the analysis, and the analysis is based on limited data. That’s one of my major updates. For all the flaws of eyewitness testimony, I think we need more of it, given the failures of other kinds of data in predicting the election result.
“I saw this thing. I tried to do this thing. It is very hard. You do not want to elect someone who can’t do the thing.” is a meaningful piece of evidence. If handling foreign policy is a “thinky” kind of activity that takes lots of care and self-restraint, and it seems like Eliezer’s experience is enough to confirm that it is, then we do have evidence from Trump’s lifelong career that he will be bad at that, given that he has a very short attention span and poor impulse control. It’s still possible that he will butt out of anything too technical and leave it to experts.
“Wars are caused by lack of clarity on which boundaries will be defended” sounds intuitively right, but I know little enough about military history to have really any opinion on that. If the President has a habit of shooting his mouth off, will that cause wars, or will people just stop believing the President? I’m genuinely uncertain.
Is Eliezer fucking up in a big way by being this anti-Trump? I put a little credence in “Trump is not unusually dangerous and a reasonable person should never have thought he was”, but he is definitely weird and different and this is not a normal election. I don’t buy “the world is in a business-as-usual state with no big trends” as a model to begin with. There are trends, there is “history”, large changes do happen. So, no, I don’t think Eliezer is fucking up in that sense.
Was it a mistake for him to have a loose, casual FB page with sloppier thinking than his more formal writing? Well, everyone on the internet has moved from more formal to sloppier forms of communication, and I think that is a bad move, and we should all be quite worried about that.