= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Eugine_Nier comments on Why we need better science, example #6,281 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (24)
Absent any other prior, why would you use anything other than "My body will react to hormones the same way most other people's bodies react to hormones"?
And you can't self-experiment on risk of a heart attack. Your only endpoint is "I had a heart attack" or "I didn't have a heart attack", and even if you don't mind getting your experimental result exactly one instant too late to help you, with a sample size of one you can't draw any conclusions about whether taking HRT for ten years contributed to your heart attack or not.
And probably the most important reason is that medicine is weird. Even when the smartest people try to predict results that should be obvious, they very often get them wrong. "Based on what I know about the body, this sounds like it should work" is the worst reason to do anything. I know that sounds contrary to Bayes, but getting burned again and again by things that sound like they should work has recalibrated me on this one.
If you're saying that you have unusual incentives here - eg that you value the possibility of adding to your natural lifespan enough that you're willing to accept a small risk of subtracting from it and a large risk that you're wasting time and money, that's fair enough.
Reality isn't weird. What this means is that you know less about the body then you think you do.
Well, "reality isn't weird" can mean a couple of different things. "Weird" is a two-part predicate like "sexiness"; things are only weird in reference to some particular mind's preconceptions. Even Yog-Sothoth doesn't seem weird to his own mother.
But if we use the word "weird" as a red flag to tell others that they can expect to be surprised or confused when entering a certain field, as long as we can predict that their minds and preconceptions work somewhat like ours, it's a useful word.
I think Eliezer's "reality is not weird" post was just trying to say that we can't blame reality for being weird, or expect things to be irreducibly weird even after we challenge our preconceptions. I don't think Eliezer was saying that we can't describe anything as "weird" if it actually exists; after all, he himself has been known to describe certain potential laws of physics as weird.
(man, basing an argument on the trivial word choices of a venerated community leader spotted in an old archive makes me feel so Jewish)
But one can blame a theory for finding reality weird. In particular, you seem to be using "weird" to mean frequently behaves in ways that don't agree with our models. That should cause you to lower your confidence in the models.
"Yes: that too is the tradition."
And reality knows more. That's why I advocate checking with reality.