Comment by Veedrac
4 days ago
There is no honor in hiding behind euphemisms. Rationalists say ‘low confidence’ and ‘high confidence’ all the time, just not when they're making an actual bet and need to directly compare credences. And the 16.27% mockery is completely dishonest. They used less than a single significant figure.
> just not when they're making an actual bet
That is not my experience talking with rationalists irl at all. And that is precisely my issue, it is pervasive in every day discussion about any topic, at least with the subset of rationalists I happen to cross paths with. If it was just for comparing ability to forecast or for bets, then sure it would make total sense.
Just the other day I had a conversation with someone about working in AI safety, it when something like "well I think there is 10 to 15% chance of AGI going wrong, and if I join I have maybe 1% chance of being able to make an impact and if.. and if... and if, so if we compare with what I'm missing by not going to <biglab> instead I have 35% confidence it's the right decision"
What makes me uncomfortable with this, is that by using this kind of reasoning and coming out with a precise figure at the end, it cognitively bias you into being more confident in your reasoning than you should be. Because we are all used to treat numbers as the output of a deterministic, precise, scientific process.
There is no reason to say 10% or 15% and not 8% or 20% for rogue AGI, there is no reason to think one individual can change the direction by 1% and not by 0.3% or 3%, it's all just random numbers, and so when you multiply a gut feeling number by a gut feeling number 5 times in a row, you end up with something absolutely meaningless, where the margin of error is basically 100%.
But it somehow feels more scientific and reliable because it's a precise number, and I think this is dishonest and misleading both to the speaker themselves and to listeners. "Low confidence", or "im really not sure but I think..." have the merit of not hiding a gut feeling process behind a scientific veil.
To be clear I'm not saying you should never use numerics to try to quantify gut feeling, it's ok to say I think there is maybe 10% chance of rogue AGI and thus I want to do this or that. What I really don't like is the stacking of multiple random predictions and trying to reason about this in good faith.
> And the 16.27% mockery is completely dishonest.
Obviously satire
I wonder if what you observe is a direct effect of the rationalist movement worshipping the god of Bayes.