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WrongBot comments on The 5-Second Level - Less Wrong
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Comments (310)
How did you arrive at this conclusion? Did you really think it through or is it just a knee-jerk reaction?
So does the traditional explanation.
So is the traditional explanation. War in Iraq, anyone?
This is a very silly reason to reject an idea.
Not always. Time-consuming investigations have a disutility value - if the prior for theories in this reference class multiplied by the utility of finding this idea to be true does not overcome that disutility, you ought not investigate. That is a very serious reason to reject an idea. If you do not give some weight to time costs of investigation, I have a reductio ad absurdum here that will monopolise your free time forever.
That's true. But that's a reason to not investigate and not read this thread and not think about the subject at all, not a reason to reply in this thread that the idea is unlikely, much less to declare it unlikely.
If your reaction to reading about the truther idea is "the value of knowing the facts about this issue, whatever they are, is rather low, and it would be time consuming to learn them, so I don't care" that is A-OK. If your reaction is "the value of knowing the facts about this issue, whatever they are, is rather low, and it would be time consuming to learn them, therefore I am not going to update whatsoever on this issue and will ignore the evidence I know is available and yet still have a strong, high-confidence belief on it" then that seems kind of silly to me.
Does that make sense? Do you agree, or not? This is not an issue I feel very strongly about, but value of information is something I've been thinking about more recently and so I think that hearing others' opinions on it would be useful. At the very least, worth the time to read them :) Amusing link, by the way.
I agree with you that "investigating is time-consuming" is not a defense for declaring ideas you don't like to be unlikely.
If it's a priori deemed unlikely, deciding not to investigate will lead to it staying this way, and one could as well express this state of knowledge in posting to the thread.
It's a reason to keep the idea rejected, without giving it a chance to become accepted.
A brief continuance on the derailment of the thread:
The 9/11 attack undisputedly did involve a conspiracy.
The question here is, by whom? (a. just by foreign terrorists, b. an "inside job").
What does that have to do with anything? A reduction in unemployment can be used to score political points...that certainly doesn't make is unlikely
This is subjective - penalty?
The biggest point is: the orthodox explanation of the collapse seems robust to me on its own merits. There are other questions.
I think your points are all valid but they were downvoted because they are against the group belief.
Labeling these as 1-5 from top to bottom, 2 contributes to 1 (you may be double-penalizing if you're counting them distinctly), and 4 (time cost to investigate) doesn't seem like a valid reason to discount a hypothesis.
I don't know whether I disagree with your conclusion -- I haven't bothered to read arguments about the topic and probably will continue to not do so because the expected value of such data is of pretty low for me -- I just wanted to point out possible errors in your process.
2 contributes to 1, yes, but conspiracy hypotheses are flawed for reasons other than their complexity.
I agree with you on 4: it isn't a reason to discount the hypothesis, but it is a reason to avoid seeking further information on the topic (high opportunity cost).
On reflection, I now regret engaging on this topic. My apologies for time wasted.
Please don't. Your comment was an example that it is possible to reply politely and rationally even in a discussion on topic that you (presumably) consider irrational. That is a nice skill to have.