Hi David, Iām afraid you might have gotten caught up in a tangent here! The main point of my comment was that your post criticizes me on the basis of a misrepresentation. You claim that my āprimary argumentative move is to assign nontrivial probabilities without substantial new evidence,ā but actually thatās false. Thatās just not what my blog post was about.
In retrospect, I think my attempt to briefly summarize what my post was about was too breezy, and misled many into thinking that its point was trivial. But it really isnāt. (In fact, Iād say that my core point there about taking higher-order uncertainty into account is far more substantial and widely neglected than the ānaming gameā fallacy that you discuss in the present post!) I mention in another comment how it applied to Schwitzgebelās ānegligibility argumentā against longtermism, for example, where he very explicitly relies on a single constant probability model in order to make his case. Failing to adequately take model uncertainty into account is a subtle and easily-overlooked mistake!
A lot of your comment here seems to misunderstand my criticism of your earlier paper. Iām not objecting that you failed to share your personal probabilities. Iām objecting that your paper gives the impression that longtermism is undermined so long as the time of perils hypothesis is judged to be likely false. But actually the key question is whether its probability is negligible. Your paper fails to make clear what the key question to assess is, and the point of my āRule High Stakes Inā post is to explain why itās really the question of negligibility that matters.
To keep discussions clean and clear, Iād prefer to continue discussion of my other post over on that post rather than here. Again, my objection to this post is simply that it misrepresented me.
Hi David, Iām afraid you might have gotten caught up in a tangent here! The main point of my comment was that your post criticizes me on the basis of a misrepresentation. You claim that my āprimary argumentative move is to assign nontrivial probabilities without substantial new evidence,ā but actually thatās false. Thatās just not what my blog post was about.
In retrospect, I think my attempt to briefly summarize what my post was about was too breezy, and misled many into thinking that its point was trivial. But it really isnāt. (In fact, Iād say that my core point there about taking higher-order uncertainty into account is far more substantial and widely neglected than the ānaming gameā fallacy that you discuss in the present post!) I mention in another comment how it applied to Schwitzgebelās ānegligibility argumentā against longtermism, for example, where he very explicitly relies on a single constant probability model in order to make his case. Failing to adequately take model uncertainty into account is a subtle and easily-overlooked mistake!
A lot of your comment here seems to misunderstand my criticism of your earlier paper. Iām not objecting that you failed to share your personal probabilities. Iām objecting that your paper gives the impression that longtermism is undermined so long as the time of perils hypothesis is judged to be likely false. But actually the key question is whether its probability is negligible. Your paper fails to make clear what the key question to assess is, and the point of my āRule High Stakes Inā post is to explain why itās really the question of negligibility that matters.
To keep discussions clean and clear, Iād prefer to continue discussion of my other post over on that post rather than here. Again, my objection to this post is simply that it misrepresented me.