Thanks for writing this! I'm glad to see my post getting engagement, and I wish I'd joined the discussion here sooner.
I feel like my argument got a strawmanned (and I don't think you did that intentionally). I fully agree with this bit:
"Methods like the above will result in better probability estimates than if we acted as though we knew nothing at all."
I think it's entirely reasonable for someone to say: "I feel safe walking out the door because I think there's an extremely low probability that Zeus will s... (read more)
Hi Chris :)
Sorry you felt your argument got strawmanned. Perhaps I should've been clearer about the relationship between this post and yours. Basically, the Kyle example in your post prompted me to consider the questions in this post, and see if I could test the idea of assigning and making sense of probabilities against cases like those. It was more like that example in your post was a jumping off point, which I decided to take as throwing down a gauntlet I could interesting put my own ideas up against. It wasn't like I saw this post as focusing on arguing against any core claims in yours.
This is part of why I actually mention you and your post only a couple times, and don't say things like "I think Smith is wrong", but rather "I think ultimately we can make sense of Kyle’s probability estimate, and that Kyle can have at least some grounding for it." Which doesn't directly conflict with what you say in that quote. You say you don't know what sense to make of Kyle's estimate, not that we can't make sense of his estimate. I suggest one way we could make sense of estimates in situations like that one, though I note that that's not likely to be what people actually are doing.
So to what seems to me to be the core claim in your post, and definitely the claim you emphasise in this comment, the main thing I say in this post is:
Which I think can be consistent with your view, though it doesn't take a strong stance on it.
Does this clear up how I see the relationship between your post and this one? Or is there something that still feels strawmanny in here?
In any case, I did write a different post that actually does (sort-of, tentatively, and with some nuance) disagree in one section with what I think you were arguing for in your optimizer's curse post. (Though it also accepts some of your claims as true and important, and it was because of your post that I learned about the optimizer's curse, so I'm grateful for that.) I'd be quite interested in your thoughts on th
Hi Michael,
Thanks for writing this! I'm glad to see my post getting engagement, and I wish I'd joined the discussion here sooner.
I feel like my argument got a strawmanned (and I don't think you did that intentionally). I fully agree with this bit:
I think it's entirely reasonable for someone to say: "I feel safe walking out the door because I think there's an extremely low probability that Zeus will s... (read more)