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NancyLebovitz comments on Your Strength as a Rationalist - Less Wrong
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Comments (113)
I don't see that you did anything at all irrational. You're talking to a complete stranger on the internet. He doesn't know you, and cannot have any possible interest in deceiving you. He tells you a fairly detailed story and asks for you advice. For him to make the whole thing up just for kicks is an example of highly irrational and fairly unlikely behavior.
Conversely, a person's panicking over chest pains and calling the ambulance is a comparatively frequent occurrence. Your having read somewhere something about ambulance policies does not amount to having concrete, irrefutable knowledge that an ambulance crew cannot make an on-site determination that there's no need to take a person to the hospital. To a person without extensive medical knowledge there is nothing particularly unlikely about the story you were told.
Therefore, the situation is this -- you are told by a complete stranger that has no reason to lie to you a perfectly believable story. You have no concrete reason ("read something somewhere" does not qualify) to doubt either the story or the man's sanity. Thus there is nothing illogical about taking the story at face value. You did the perfectly rational thing.
Since there was no irrationality in your initial behavior, the conclusions that you arrive at further in your post are unfounded.
DP
You're talking to a complete stranger on the internet. He doesn't know you, and cannot have any possible interest in deceiving you.
There's plenty of evidence that some people (a smallish minority, I think) will deceive strangers for the fun of it.
Which, as I said later on in the same paragraph, is irrational and unlikely behavior. Therefore, when lacking any factual evidence, the reasonable presumption is that that's not the case.
DP
I think many of us have actually encountered liars on the Internet. I'm not sure what you mean when you say "lacking any factual evidence".
I presume that you have encountered liars in the real world as well. Do you, on that basis, habitually assume that a random stranger engaging in casual conversation with you is a liar?
My point is that pathological liars are a small minority. So if you're dealing with a person that you know absolutely nothing about, and who does not have any conceivable reason to lie to you, there is nothing unreasonable in assuming that he's telling you the truth, unless you have factual evidence (i.e. you have accurate, verifiable knowledge of ambulance policies) that contradicts what he's saying.
DP
I think at this point the questions have become (a) "how many bits of evidence does it take to raise 'someone is lying' to prominence as a hypothesis?" and (b) "how many bits of evidence can I assign to 'someone is lying' after evaluating the probability of this story based on what I know?"
I believe your argument is that a > b (specifically, that a is large and b is small), where the post asserts that a < b. I'm not going to say that's unreasonable, given that all we know is what Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote, but often actual experience has much more detail than any feasible summary - I'm willing to grant him the benefit of the doubt, given that his tiny note of discord got the right answer in this instance.
My argument is what I stated, nothing more. Namely that there is nothing unreasonable about assuming that a perfect stranger that you're having a casual conversation with is not trying to deceive you. I already laid out my reasoning for it. I'm not sure what more I can add.
DP
"Do you, on that basis, habitually assume that a random stranger engaging in casual conversation with you is a liar?"
Yes. Absolutely. Almost /everyone/ lies to complete strangers sometimes. Who among us has never given an enhanced and glamourfied story about who they are to a stranger they struck up a conversation with on a train?
Never? Really? Not even /once/?
If everyone regularly talked to strangers on trains, and exactly once lied to such a stranger, it would still be pretty safe to assume that any given train-stranger is being honest with you.
Actually, yes, you're entirely right.
In conversations I've had about this with friends - good grief, there's a giant flashing anecdata alert if ever I did see one, but it's the best we've got to go off here - I would suspect that people do it often enough that it's a reasonable thing to consider in a situation like the one being discussed here, though.
Not that I think it's a bad thing that the person in question didn't, mind you. It would be a very easy option not to consider.