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brazil84 comments on Amanda Knox: post mortem - Less Wrong
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Comments (483)
So, to summarize why you didn't update:
Boy was Upton Sinclair ever right.
I'm not sure that's the way to put it, but let me ask you this: How much stock do you put in the unsupported assertion of an anonymous person on the internet?
Please quote me where I made that assertion.
Well I need to be decent at a minimum. But basically yeah. I assess cases day in and day out. That's a huge advantage. I know that I'm much better than I was 15 years ago, even though I was just as smart then as I am now.
Sure, getting this kind of feedback is a good way to improve one's judgment. Do you seriously disagree?
:shrug: I agree, but employment is sadly not the only motivator for self-deception. Let me ask you this:
Do you agree that the tone of your post is a bit nasty?
How much stock do you put in the supported assertion of an anonymous person on the internet? I think that's a more relevant question here. To what degree does a poster's anonymity detract from his argument?
Quite a lot. But I don't think that's the right question. See, the basic argument being made is that even though I have considered Mr. Anonymous' arguments and decided they were without merit, I should still be significantly less certain of my position simply because a number of these anonymous people (making basically the same weak arguments) disagree with me. Did I misunderstand the argument being made?
Yes. The point is that in "deciding [the arguments] were without merit", you didn't take sufficient account of the quality (not merely the quantity, by the way) of the people making them.
If a high-quality person says "X is true", you might be able to dismiss it if you have sufficient knowledge. But if they say "X is true because of A,B, and C", you can't dismiss X without also dismissing A, B, and C. And here the problem is with your judgement about A, B, and C, not (just) your judgement about X.
I'm pretty confident that I did. If you see a problem with the arguments I made back in the original thread, please feel free to respond (preferably there) and I'm happy to consider your point in good faith.
To the extent that you don't think that you're more reliable than those people, you're engaging in a treatment of evidence that is simply wrong. The fact of someone's belief is evidence weighted according to the reliability of their mechanisms for establishing belief. That's the principle behind Aumann's Agreement Theorem.
I'm not sure I understand your point. My belief that I have superior judgment in this area is based on actual knowledge about myself and my experiences. "Faith" implies that there is no such basis.
I don't recall claiming or implying that I was basing my assessment on "faith," but I could be wrong. Which is why I am giving loqi a chance to back up his statement.
If "have faith" is changed to "believe" everyone here should agree.
But not knowledge of the other commenters and their experiences, whom you seem to have lumped into the reference class of "anonymous internet commenters," which you assign a low assessment of competence.
If you want to find a lot of people with significant expertise in rendering judgment under uncertainty, I think this is a pretty good place to look.
Yes. It's a combination of having little respect for the feelings of typically-wrong pseudonymous internet posters as well as faith in my own ability to look at incomplete justifications for sloppy reasoning and draw snarky conclusions.
Ok, and again my questions:
Please quote me where I made that assertion.
Sure, getting this kind of feedback is a good way to improve one's judgment. Do you seriously disagree?
Nobody seems to have answered this question directly, though it seems easy...
See the direct parent of the post you were replying to (which I think should have been obvious since it was presented as a summary):
Also, don't you at least see the tension between:
It seems the logical conclusion is that you've lost your job.
Ok, so you agree that in the exact post where I used the word "faith," I summarized the factual basis for confidence in my own judgment?
That would be the case if my livelihood depended on exercising perfect judgment at all times. Which fortunately it does not.
Let me ask you basically the same question I asked the other poster:
Do you agree that getting feedback about one's judgment (including being wrong from time to time) is helpful in improving one's judgment?
No, I don't particularly care to parse all that enough to agree to anything. I was just answering your question since it seemed like nobody else had bothered to. People seem to have an odd problem answering questions with obvious-seeming answers, even though they are often helpful to people. For example, the other day on aiqus someone was asking how to type the | symbol, and the answer was straightforwardly a series of directions starting from locating the "Enter" key on a US keyboard. It turned out to be very helpful to the OP, as there was a piece of lint blocking the | symbol.. I was pleasantly surprised that the OP did not merely become the subject of ridicule, as I've often seen with 'obvious' seeming questions in other contexts.
No thanks.
Suit yourself, but you will be missing the problem with loqi's statement.
Again, it's your choice. But I think that answering the question will help you to see why it's not necessarily a contradiction to (1) have one's livelihood depend on making good judgments; and (2) regularly make judgments which turn out to be wrong.
I saw that. That's why I used the word 'tension' rather than the word 'contradiction'.
(Though looking for a reference for how the word 'tension' is used in the discipline of Philosophy, I can't seem to find anything online - it's used extensively on SEP, and there was a book written in 1936 on the word's proper use, but the sense used in Philosophy doesn't even make it into OED).
Well you also said "It seems the logical conclusion is that you've lost your job."
Indeed, that's why I used the word "seems".
A good rule of thumb: If it looks like someone is making an obviously stupid mistake, you're probably misunderstanding them. It's a benefit of the principle of charity.
I don't understand your point. Are you saying that you knew all along that there wasn't contradiction; that you were simply observing that there might appear to be a contradiction to some people?