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Voltairina comments on Rationality Quotes March 2012 - Less Wrong
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― Cory Doctorow, For The Win
I interpret this to mean that often times questions are overlooked because the possibility of them being true seems absurd. Similar to the Sherlock Holmes saying, “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
When you've eliminated the impossible, if whatever's left is sufficiently improbable, you probable haven't considered a wide enough space of candidate possibilities.
Seems fair. The Holmes saying seems a bit funny to me now that I think about it, because the probability of an unlikely event changes to become more likely when you've shown that reality appears constrained from the alternatives. I mean, I guess that's what he's trying to convey in his own way. But, by the definition of probability, the likelihood of the improbable event increases as constraints appear preventing the other possibilities. You're going from P(A) to P(A|B) to P(A|(B&C)) to.. etc. You shouldn't be simultaneously aware that an event is improbable and seeing that no other alternative is true at the same time, unless you're being informed of the probability, given the constraints, by someone else, which means that yes, they appear to be considering more candidate possibilities (or their estimate was incorrect. Or something I haven't thought of...).
Maybe he meant how a priori improbable it is?
That sounds right.
I interpret it to mean that Cory Doctorow doesn't fully consider the implications of hindsight bias when it comes to predicting the merits of asking questions from a given class.
Usually asking stupid questions really is just stupid.
Hrm. Okay, I see your point, I think. I think there's some benefit in devoting a small portion of your efforts to pursuing outlying hypotheses. Probably proportional to the chance of them being true, I guess, depending on how divisible the resources are. If by "stupid", Doctorow means "basic", he might be talking about overlooked issues everyone assumed had already been addressed. But I guess probabilistically that's the same thing - its unlikely after a certain amount of effort that basic issues haven't been addressed, so its an outlying hypothesis, and should again get approximately as much attention as its likelihood of being true, depending on resources and how neatly they can be divided up. And maybe let the unlikely things bubble up in importance if the previously-thought-more-likely things shrink due to apparently conflicting evidence... A glaring example to me seems the abrahamic god's nonexplanatory abilities going unquestioned for as long as they did. Like, treating god as a box to throw unexplained things in and then hiding god behind "mysteriousness" begs the question of why there's a god clouded in mysteriousness hanging around.
But the expected return on asking a stupid question is still positive.
Asking stupid questions costs status.
From a slightly different perspective we could say that asking 'silly' questions (even good silly questions) costs status while asking stupid questions can potentially gain status in those cases where the people who hear you ask are themselves stupid (or otherwise incentivised to appreciate a given stupid gesture).
And this sort of thing is why some of us think all this 'status' talk is harmful.
It doesn't go away if you stop talking about it.
Personally, I think Robin Hanson tends to treat status as a hammer that turns all issues into nails; it's certainly possible to overuse a perspective for analyzing social interaction. But that doesn't mean that there aren't cases where you can only get a meaningful picture of social actions by taking it into consideration.
Nowadays, I can ask a question of the entire WEIRD world without losing any status. There are still some that just aren't worth wasting my time on. For example: Is the moon actually a moose?
No, but worrying about status can keep you from getting answers to your 'stupid' questions.
This is partly why nerds have largely internalized the "there are no stupid questions" rule. See Obvious Answers to Simple Questions by isaacs of npm fame.
No, not with even the slightest semblance of opportunity cost being taken into account.
I'd say there are probably cases where people have gotten hurt by not asking "stupid" questions.
Also, I think we need to dissolve what exactly a stupid question is?
Almost certainly. I am also fairly confident that there is someone who has been hurt because he did look before crossing the road.
But does the negative utility from the situations "find out, get hurt from it" outweight "don't find out, get hurt from it?"
Isn't the heuristic More Knowledge => Better Decisions quite powerful?
Get to the stupid questions after all the sensible questions have been exhausted if, for some reason, the expected utility of the next least stupid question is still positive.
I think we need to find out what we mean by stupid and sensible questions.
Of course one should in any given situation perform the experiments (ask questions) that gives highes expected information (largest number of bits) yield, I.E. ask if it is a vertebrae before you ask if it is a dog. What I think we disagree upon is the nature of a stupid question.
And now, it seems I cannot come up with a good definition of a stupid question as anything I previously would refer to as a "stupid question" can be equally reduced to humility.