I think this is dumb; I don’t see any particular evidence that this happens very often, and I’m much more worried about people being overconfident about things based on tenuous, badly thought out, oversimplified models than I am about them being underconfident because of concerns like these.
According to Eliezer, in the cog sci literature people don’t systematically undercorrect for biases like overconfidence when warned to avoid them. Rather, they’re systematically miscalibrated about whether they’re overcorrecting or undercorrecting. (“Yes, I know, I was surprised too.”)
If our cure for moderate cases of overconfidence tends to produce extreme underconfidence, then we can be left worse off that we were originally, especially if there are community norms punishing people more for sounding overconfident than for sounding underconfident.
Hmm, though I agree with the idea that people tend to be overconfident, the critique of this style of reasoning is exactly that it leads to overconfidence. I think the argument “people tend to be underconfident, not overconfident” does not seem to bear a lot on the truth of this critique.
(e.g. underconfidence is having believes that tend towards the middling ranges, overconfidence is having extreme beliefs. Eliezer argues that this style of reasoning leads one to assign extremely low probabilities to events, which should be classified as overconfident)
But point 3 relies on underconfident estimates of the individual factors.
I’m not sure that addresses Buck’s point. I just don’t think you can reduce this to “people tend to be overconfident”, even if it’s a conclusion in a limited domain.
I think this is dumb; I don’t see any particular evidence that this happens very often, and I’m much more worried about people being overconfident about things based on tenuous, badly thought out, oversimplified models than I am about them being underconfident because of concerns like these.
According to Eliezer, in the cog sci literature people don’t systematically undercorrect for biases like overconfidence when warned to avoid them. Rather, they’re systematically miscalibrated about whether they’re overcorrecting or undercorrecting. (“Yes, I know, I was surprised too.”)
If our cure for moderate cases of overconfidence tends to produce extreme underconfidence, then we can be left worse off that we were originally, especially if there are community norms punishing people more for sounding overconfident than for sounding underconfident.
Hmm, though I agree with the idea that people tend to be overconfident, the critique of this style of reasoning is exactly that it leads to overconfidence. I think the argument “people tend to be underconfident, not overconfident” does not seem to bear a lot on the truth of this critique.
(e.g. underconfidence is having believes that tend towards the middling ranges, overconfidence is having extreme beliefs. Eliezer argues that this style of reasoning leads one to assign extremely low probabilities to events, which should be classified as overconfident)
But point 3 relies on underconfident estimates of the individual factors.
I’m not sure that addresses Buck’s point. I just don’t think you can reduce this to “people tend to be overconfident”, even if it’s a conclusion in a limited domain.