It sounds like you’re claiming something like “all information is valuable information, because even if the information is false you’ve learned something (e.g. that the source is untrustworthy)”. I think this is too strong of a claim. Trying to figure out what’s true amidst lots of falsehoods is very difficult and takes time. Most people in real life aren’t playing perfect Werewolf with a complex Bayesian model that encompasses all hypotheses. Quite the opposite, from what I’ve seen both in myself and others, our natural tendency is to quickly collapse on one hypothesis and then interpret everything through that lens (confirmation bias). I think this is what’s happening with a lot of the reactions to this post, and I don’t think it’s valuable.
If you’d instead said “this post is valuable if you view it as a game of Werewolf, keep your hypothesis space open and update as new evidence comes in” then I’d be more in agreement. I think this is still a very difficult task though, and I’d rather that Ben had waited for Nonlinear’s counter-evidence and taken that that into consideration instead of forcing us to play Werewolf with his post. (Basically, I’m suggesting that Ben does the hard job of playing Werewolf for us. This is explicitly not what he did, as he himself says in his disclaimer of explicitly seeking out anti-nonlinear evidence.)
Disclaimer: I am friends with Kat and know some of the counter-evidence.
It sounds like you’re claiming something like “all information is valuable information, because even if the information is false you’ve learned something (e.g. that the source is untrustworthy)”. I think this is too strong of a claim. Trying to figure out what’s true amidst lots of falsehoods is very difficult and takes time. Most people in real life aren’t playing perfect Werewolf with a complex Bayesian model that encompasses all hypotheses. Quite the opposite, from what I’ve seen both in myself and others, our natural tendency is to quickly collapse on one hypothesis and then interpret everything through that lens (confirmation bias). I think this is what’s happening with a lot of the reactions to this post, and I don’t think it’s valuable.
If you’d instead said “this post is valuable if you view it as a game of Werewolf, keep your hypothesis space open and update as new evidence comes in” then I’d be more in agreement. I think this is still a very difficult task though, and I’d rather that Ben had waited for Nonlinear’s counter-evidence and taken that that into consideration instead of forcing us to play Werewolf with his post. (Basically, I’m suggesting that Ben does the hard job of playing Werewolf for us. This is explicitly not what he did, as he himself says in his disclaimer of explicitly seeking out anti-nonlinear evidence.)
Disclaimer: I am friends with Kat and know some of the counter-evidence.