CuSithBell comments on Debate between 80,000 hours and a socialist - Less Wrong
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"Extremely tendentious" is not what I want. The ideas of 80k make a lot of sense to me and a lot of what Mills was arguing did not, but I tried to paraphrase them as accurately as I could, or leave quotes in when I couldn't. [1] Which parts do you think badly represent their sources?
[1] For example, "The language of probability will always fail to capture the possibility of system change. What was the expected value of the civil rights movement, or the campaign for universal suffrage, or anticolonial struggles for independence? As we have seen most recently with the Arab Spring, every revolution is impossible, until it is inevitable." was originally [misunderstands probability] but I tried to be fairer to him and avoid my own biases by using his own words.)
Regarding your example, I think what Mills is saying is probably a fair point - or rather, it's probably a gesture towards a fair point, muddied by rhetorical constraints and perhaps misunderstanding of probability. It is very difficult to actually get good numbers to predict things outside of our past experience, and so probability as used by humans to decide policy is likely to have significant biases.