Here's another installment of rationality quotes. The usual rules apply:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
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That's a good point.
Plugging gut assumptions into models to make sure that the assumptions line up with each other generally produces better results for me. Beyond it just feeling better, it gives me things I can go away and test that I'd never have got otherwise.
Like if I think something's 75% likely to happen in X period and I think that something else is more likely to happen than that - do I think that the second thing is 80% likely to happen? And does that line up with information that I already have? Numbers force you to think proportionally. They network your assumptions together until you can start picking out bits of data that you have that are testable.
Intuitions aren't magic, of course, but they're rarely completely baseless.