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taw comments on Reference class of the unclassreferenceable - Less Wrong
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So you're basically taking extreme version of position 3 from my list - rejecting outside view as very rarely applicable to anything. Am I right?
Works great when you're drawing from the same barrel as previous occasions. Project prediction, traffic forecasts, which way to drive to the airport... Predicting the far future from the past - you can't call that the Outside View and give it the privileges and respect of the Outside View. It's an attempt to reason by analogy, no more, no less.
I certainly do. It's my strong impression that so does almost everyone outside of the Less Wrong community and a majority of people in this community, so according to the outside view of majoritarianism I'm probably right.
Taleb's "The Black Swan" is basically a treatise on failures from uses of the outside view.
It sometimes seems to me that the issue of how much trust to accord outside views constitutes the primary factional division within this community, separating it into two groups that one might call the "Hansonians" and the "Yudkowskians" (with the former trusting outside views -- or distrusting inside views -- more than the latter).
I share Michael Vassar's impression about the statistical distribution of these viewpoints (I'm particularly expecting this to be the case among high-status community members) , but an actual survey might be worth conducting.
Of course there are a lot of failures from uses of the outside view. That is to be expected. The problem is that there are a lot more failures from uses of the inside view.
Citation needed (for the general case).