William_Quixote comments on Rationality Quotes April 2014 - LessWrong

8 Post author: elharo 07 April 2014 05:25PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (656)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: William_Quixote 11 April 2014 10:09:19PM *  1 point [-]

Put another way, what it's saying is "if you look at people who don't come from the past and don't have large status quo bias you will notice a trend".

Is this falsifiable?

I suspect it is falsifiable. I might unpack it as the following sub claims

1 Degree of status quo bias is positively correlated to time spent in a particular status quo (my gut tells me there should be a causal link, but I bet correlation is all you could find in studies)

2 On issue X, belief that X[past] is the correct way to do X is correlated with time spent living in an X[past] regime.

2.5 Possibly a corollary to the above, but maybe a separate claim: among people who you would expect to have the least status quo bias position X[other] is favored at much higher rates than among the general population

For most issues 2 and 2.5 can probably be checked with good polling data. Point 1 is the kind of thing its possible to do studies on, so I think its in principle falsifiable, though I don’t know if such studies have actually been done.

Comment author: bramflakes 12 April 2014 11:57:02AM 4 points [-]

2) is also what you would expect to see if X[past] was indeed better than X[other].

2.5) Not having status quo bias isn't equivalent to being unbiased. A large number of the people that are least likely to have status quo bias are going to be at the other end of the spectrum - chronic contrarians.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 April 2014 07:44:46AM *  1 point [-]

2) is also what you would expect to see if X[past] was indeed better than X[other].

Note that which X is better may depend on circumstances (e.g. technological level).