Shouldn’t a combination of those two heuristics lead to spreading out the probability but with somewhat more probability mass on the longer-term rather than the shorter term?
That’s fair, and I do try to think about this sort of thing when choosing e.g. how wide to make my probability distributions and where to center them; I often make them wider than feels reasonable to me. I didn’t mean to imply that I explicitly avoid incorporating such outside view considerations, just that returns to further thinking about them are often lower by their nature (since they’re often about unkown-unkowns).
True. My main concern here is the lamppost issue (looking under the lamppost because that’s where the light is). If the unknown unknowns affect the probability distribution, then personally I’d prefer to incorporate that or at least explicitly acknowledge it. Not a critique—I think you do acknowledge it—but just a comment.
Shouldn’t a combination of those two heuristics lead to spreading out the probability but with somewhat more probability mass on the longer-term rather than the shorter term?
That’s fair, and I do try to think about this sort of thing when choosing e.g. how wide to make my probability distributions and where to center them; I often make them wider than feels reasonable to me. I didn’t mean to imply that I explicitly avoid incorporating such outside view considerations, just that returns to further thinking about them are often lower by their nature (since they’re often about unkown-unkowns).
True. My main concern here is the lamppost issue (looking under the lamppost because that’s where the light is). If the unknown unknowns affect the probability distribution, then personally I’d prefer to incorporate that or at least explicitly acknowledge it. Not a critique—I think you do acknowledge it—but just a comment.