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taw comments on A potentially great improvement to minimum wage laws to handle both economic efficiency as well as poverty concerns - Less Wrong
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Comments (74)
Then the data were wrong. Sorry, enormous net exodous rates trump Goodharted metrics. When you use a metric, you have to know the extent of its applicability. When "high growth" coincides with people risking death to get the hell out, you don't say, wow what amazing growth!
The "if data disagrees with my view so the data is wrong" reaction is exactly what I thought makes it a good litmus test.
The test was not for agreement or disagreement, it was for absence or presence of kneejerk reaction that rejects all data without even bothering to look at it.
But as far as I know, you might still be perfectly rational as long as it doesn't involve economics or politics, just as the Pope can be perfectly rational as long as it doesn't involve religion. People just have their weird compartments.
What Eugine said. See I defy the data, which I summarize as:
Your models of the world must be consilient. If you find "growth" coinciding with "nothing new being built since before communists took over", then yes, you should "defy" the supposed growth data. If growth means anything, it means, "people don't risk death trying to float away because of poor opportunities". If you try to reinterpret the world so that such a circumstance "really" counts as growth, then you've fundamentally forgotten why you came up with that metric in the first place.
It is far more a case of "compartmentalization" to say that "except with respect to every on-the-ground observable, this country has high growth, because that's what their economic numbers say, and don't tell me about what you saw there, that's a separate, non-overlapping magisterium".
No, this is a case of "the data fails to agree with observation and furthermore is in a field notorious for data manipulation and sometimes outright falsification, therefore the data is wrong with high probability".
Relying on "data" even when it blatantly contradicts direct observation, as you seem to insist on doing, is precisely the kind of straw rationality gives rationality in general a bad name and more importantly causes many rationalists to fail.