The name “Multiple Stage Fallacy” seems to encourage equivocation: Is it a fallacy to analyze the probability of an event by breaking it down into multiple stages, or a fallacy to make the mistakes Eliezer points to?
For the Nate Silver example, Eliezer does aim to point out particular mistakes. But for Jeff, the criticism comes sort of between these two possibilities: There’s a claim that Jeff makes these mistakes (which seems to be wrong—see Jeff’s reply), but it’s as if the mere fact of “Multiple Stages” means there’s no need to actually make an argument.
Yes, I found the criticism-by-insinuation of Jeff’s post unhelpful, because none of these errors were obvious. A more concrete discussion of disagreements might be interesting.
(For what it’s worth Jeff’s analysis still looks pretty plausible to me. My biggest disagreement is on the probabilities of something “other” going wrong, which look too modestly large to me after a decent attempt to think about what might fail. It’s not clear that’s even one of the kind of errors Eliezer is talking about.)
My biggest disagreement is on the probabilities of something “other” going wrong, which look too modestly large to me after a decent attempt to think about what might fail.
After a lot of discussion in the original post, I made a new model where I (a) removed steps I thought were very likely to succeed and (b) removed most of the mass from “other” since discussing with people had increased my confidence that we’d been exhaustive: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fz9
Sorry, if I’d done my homework I’d have linked to that and might have said you agreed with me!
I was pointing out the disagreement not to critique, but to highlight that in the piece Eliezer linked to as exhibiting the problems described, it seemed to me like the biggest issue was in fact a rather different problem.
The name “Multiple Stage Fallacy” seems to encourage equivocation: Is it a fallacy to analyze the probability of an event by breaking it down into multiple stages, or a fallacy to make the mistakes Eliezer points to?
For the Nate Silver example, Eliezer does aim to point out particular mistakes. But for Jeff, the criticism comes sort of between these two possibilities: There’s a claim that Jeff makes these mistakes (which seems to be wrong—see Jeff’s reply), but it’s as if the mere fact of “Multiple Stages” means there’s no need to actually make an argument.
Yes, I found the criticism-by-insinuation of Jeff’s post unhelpful, because none of these errors were obvious. A more concrete discussion of disagreements might be interesting.
(For what it’s worth Jeff’s analysis still looks pretty plausible to me. My biggest disagreement is on the probabilities of something “other” going wrong, which look too modestly large to me after a decent attempt to think about what might fail. It’s not clear that’s even one of the kind of errors Eliezer is talking about.)
After a lot of discussion in the original post, I made a new model where I (a) removed steps I thought were very likely to succeed and (b) removed most of the mass from “other” since discussing with people had increased my confidence that we’d been exhaustive: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fz9
Sorry, if I’d done my homework I’d have linked to that and might have said you agreed with me!
I was pointing out the disagreement not to critique, but to highlight that in the piece Eliezer linked to as exhibiting the problems described, it seemed to me like the biggest issue was in fact a rather different problem.