ThisSpaceAvailable comments on A Parable of Elites and Takeoffs - Less Wrong

23 Post author: gwern 30 June 2014 11:04PM

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Comment author: ThisSpaceAvailable 07 July 2014 09:19:43PM -1 points [-]

Surely if BMR had claimed to be seeing law enforcement infiltration I would consider that evidence for infiltration, so how could I turn around and argue that lack of BMR claims was also evidence for infiltration? Yes, this is a good criticism - in a binary context.

So, if BMR had claimed to be seeing infiltration, would you consider that evidence that BMR is not about to be busted?

Comment author: gwern 07 July 2014 10:10:07PM *  0 points [-]

Yes. If a big market one expects to be under attack reports fending off attack, then one would be more optimistic about it:

Hence, observing BMR silence pushed the infiltration outcome to a high posterior while the not-trying remained still pretty unlikely. Of course, for an obscure small marketplace, the reasoning would happen the other way around: because it starts off more likely to be ignored than infiltrated, silence is golden

(That said, that only applies to the one particular kind of observation/argument from silence; as I told Chen, there were several reasons to expect BMR to be short-lived on top of the general short-livedness of black-markets, but I think the logic behind those other reasons doesn't need to be explained since they're not tricky or counterintuitive like the argument from silence.)

Comment author: ThisSpaceAvailable 08 July 2014 06:39:23AM *  -1 points [-]

Then it seems to me that when responding to "Surely if BMR had claimed to be seeing law enforcement infiltration I would consider that evidence for infiltration, so how could I turn around and argue that lack of BMR claims was also evidence for infiltration?", you should lead off with "I would consider that evidence for infiltration, but against an imminent bust", before launching into all the explanation. That way, it would more clear whether you are denying the premise ("you'd consider that evidence for your thesis, too"), rather than just the conclusion. And the phrase "If a big market one expects" would a lot clearer with "that" between "market" and "one".

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