I agree with this. It’s the right way to take this further by getting rid of leaky generalizations like ’Evidence is good, no evidence is bad,” and also to point out what you pointed out: is the evidence still virtuous if it’s from the past and you’re reasoning from it? Confused questions like that are a sign that things have been oversimplified. I’ve thought about the more general issues behind this since I wrote this, since I actually posted this on LW over two weeks ago. (I’ve been waiting for karma.) In the interim, I found an essay on Facebook by Eliezer Yudkowsky that gets to the core of why these are bad heuristics, among other things.
I agree with this. It’s the right way to take this further by getting rid of leaky generalizations like ’Evidence is good, no evidence is bad,” and also to point out what you pointed out: is the evidence still virtuous if it’s from the past and you’re reasoning from it? Confused questions like that are a sign that things have been oversimplified. I’ve thought about the more general issues behind this since I wrote this, since I actually posted this on LW over two weeks ago. (I’ve been waiting for karma.) In the interim, I found an essay on Facebook by Eliezer Yudkowsky that gets to the core of why these are bad heuristics, among other things.