I take your point to be that I have taken something that is really a matter of degree "how much weight should I give to the opinion of this or that person?" and turned it into something dichotomous "is this person a good guide for me or not?"

You have. To quote from your article:

One kind of adviser is someone whose opinion, by your lights, constitutes strong evidence regarding the answer...But they are only providers of valuable input, not good guides. I think the distinction between these two types of advisers is often missed...The point is that there should be two buckets for two different types of prestigious advice-giver, but we only really have one.

When I boil down your post+comment and look for sense, what I get is something prosaic like 'some people are so expert in a narrow area that their opinion alone is enough for me, but otherwise aren't very good on average; other people are that expert, but in a broader area'.

I think other commenters have had a similar idea, but here's one way to say it.

It seems to me that the proposition you are attacking is not exactly the one you think you are attacking. I think you think you are attacking the proposition "charitable donations should be directed to the highest EV use, regardless of the uncertainty around the EV, as long as the EV estimate is unbiased," when the proposition you are really attacking is "the analysis generating some of these very uncertain, but very high EV effect estimates is flawed, and the true EVs are in fact a great deal lower than those people claim."

The question of whether we should always be risk neutral with respect to the number of lives saved by charity is an interesting and difficult one (one that I would be interested to know what Holden thinks about). But this post is not about that difficult philosophical question, but simply about the technical question of whether the EV estimates that various people are basing themselves on are any good.

This reads like a glorification of quantitative differences into a qualitative difference. Why reify this guide/portfolio distinction?

But simply knowing what an orthodox Chicago School economist thinks about some big question would move me very little.

And why is that?

Is that because they are literally as wrong as they are right, that they are competitive only with a random number generator/max-ent predictor? If they are, then that's a very peculiar sort of insight they are offering; why do you think you are free of the crippling biases that apparently reduce their otherwise insightful analyses to random noise?

Is it because they are only somewhat more right than wrong, but they do beat random guesses? Then knowing their opinion should move your decision somewhat. (Do they not move your decision at all? But we specified they were better than randomness, and so ignoring their opinion is throwing away some amount of information.) But then, they are also somewhat equivalent to your guide - but only somewhat.

Nice. I particularly liked the dig at Rooseveltian machismo. Of course it's possible to go too far in the opposite direction too. Some related thoughts here.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/doubting_thomas.html

There is a neat paper on this by Feltovich, Harbaugh, and To called "Too Cool for School? Signaling and Countersignaling."

http://www.jstor.org/pss/3087478

Fantastic.

Some tidbits:

• Be prompt, generous, and sincere in your compliments. Ideally, don't use plain adjectives - use descriptions. (Exceptions here are compliments on articles of clothing - "your boots are AWESOME!" is kosher.) It only feels silly from your end. If you are just trying to make friends, avoid anything that (given your and the potential friend's genders) would appear laced with sexual interest, unless you can pull it off with genuine innocence and then reliably follow up with genuine innocence instead of changing tacks midway.

• Have a "standby" interaction prompt that you can pull out in lulls which isn't threatening, is generally well received, and provides a hook for further conversation. I usually offer people food. I'm sure there are others that would do - if you're trying to conduct an informal survey of something, for instance ("Hey, I'm trying to find out different ways people celebrate St. Patrick's Day, what do you do?), that would probably work too.

• Learn to pick apart people's dialogue for followup questions - you can practice this on fictional dialogue; just take a good-sized sentence and write down five followup tangents. Example:

"I went out to Cape Cod last week with my friend Tess and we found some sea glass."

Followups:

"Ooh, do you go to Cape Cod a lot?"

"Neat, what else did you do there?"

"Wow! How long did you stay on the cape?"

"Cool - what are you going to do with the sea glass?"

"Hm, I don't think I know Tess - tell me about her?"

Note that these all prompt the potential friend to talk, rather than providing an excuse for you to do so (any of the above would be preferable to, for instance, "Hey, I went to Cape Cod once and had the most fantastic lobster...") Also note that each sentence started with a particle that shows interest. Eliminating these runs a significant risk of making it sound like you're just interrogating the person. And: it is quite important that you actually want to know the answer to the question you pick. If you can come up with lists of five but don't give a crap about how any of them would be answered, you're talking to supernaturally boring people, you're a misanthrope, or you're doing the exercise wrong.

• Go ahead and be the first to suggest exchanging contact information. On the internet, this means e-mail or better, IM. In person this means a place to meet next, or possibly phone numbers or addresses (or e-mail or IM). It's scary to most everybody else, too, so don't expect them to do it. Leave a line of social retreat if they never want to hear from you again, avoid any requests for contact info customarily laced with sexual tension, but do make it clear that you think they're neat and you'd like to be their friend. You can even haul out the elementary school line "Wanna be friends?" - if it makes you feel more comfortable with it, go on a brief tangent about how "we lose so much when we leave elementary school and it's no longer socially acceptable to make friends by walking up to someone on the playground and asking if they want to be..." beat... "Wanna be my friend?".

• Cultivate social spontaneity. This one is hard to define, so I'll give an example. I was waiting for a bus and a woman I'd never met before in an awesome homemade knitted cloak tottering along on crutches said she loved my jacket. (It was my florally embroidered denim thing, by far the loudest thing I own). I was trying to make friends, so instead of thanking her and looking away, I fired back with a compliment on her cloak and soon had her talking up a storm about knitting. When she was interested in what I did with my spare time, I didn't talk about school, even though that was most salient to me at the time - I talked about cooking, gambling that the domestic handicrafts have some overlap in their aficionados. I told her I planned to make pumpkin bread as soon as I had a can of pumpkin. Which it just so happened to turn out that she had in her cupboard, and she lived in my apartment complex. So I went home with her, accepted the can of pumpkin, went home and made bread, and brought one of the loaves over to her place, where I hung out for another couple of hours chatting about textiles, her Hassidic Judaism, and her multiple personalities. (I am no longer friends with her over differences of opinion on a political/ethical matter, but it's still a great making-friends story.) Social spontaneity is what let me go to a stranger's place for canned pumpkin and bring her a loaf of bread later.

Landsburg's argument is sound, and I mostly follow it and occasionally try to sell others on it. But I can think of one exception, which is if the political power of an organization that you support depends on the number of members it has. So for example I pay membership dues to one organization that is not my main charity because I want them to be able to claim one more member.

And there is one place that I think Landsburg gets it plain wrong. He says*:

To please diverse stockholders, corporations tend to diversify their giving, often through the United Way. For individuals, by contrast, it really is quite impossible to justify that level of diversity. Surely among the hundreds of United Way recipients there are some you consider worthier than others. That means you can target your charity more effectively by bypassing the United Way.

But if you think that the United Way comes tolerably close to sharing your values, but you think that they have better information than you do about relative needs and competencies across different organizations, then it makes perfect sense to donate to them, doesn't it?

*http://www.slate.com/id/77619/

Well, the main thing that'd cause me to mistrust your judgment there, as phrased, is A8. Pre-9/11, airlines had an explicit policy of not resisting hijackers, even ones armed only with boxcutters, because they thought they could minimize casualties that way. So taking over an airplane using boxcutters pre-9/11 is perfectly normal and expected and non-anomalous; and if someone takes exception to that event, it probably implies that in general their anomaly-detectors are tuned too high.

I also suspect that some of these questions are phrased a bit promptingly, and I would ask others, like, "Do you think that malice is a more likely explanation than stupidity for the level of incompetence displayed during Hurricane Katrina? What was to be gained politically from that? Was that level of incompetence more or less than the level of hypothesized government incompetence that you think is anomalous with respect to 9/11?" and so on.

I usually try not to push people on this particular point unless I think they're already very high-level; my default assumption is that people are very akrasic and fragile when it comes to charity.

However, I'm raising my estimate of Landsburg's level based on this - I guess one mostly hears about the disputable points he got wrong, not the indisputable points he got right, of which this is one (and a rarely appreciated one at that).