I think you’re saying that my word choice is unusual here for commonsensical intuitions, but I don’t think it is? Tennis is an unusually objective field, with clear metrics and a well-defined competitive system.
When somebody says “I think Barack Obama (or your preferred presidential candidate) is the best man to be president” I highly doubt that they literally mean there’s a >50% chance that of all living America-born citizens >35 years of age, this person will be better at governing the US than everybody else.
Similarly, when somebody says “X is the best fiction author,” I doubt they are expressing >50% credence that of all humans who have ever told a story, X told the best fiction stories.
The reference class is the same as the field. Sorry I was clear. But like you said, there are >7 billion people, so “specific reference member” means something very different than “field overall.”
For future reference, Linch’s comment was in response to a comment of mine which I deleted before Linch replied, in which I used the example of saying “Federer is the best tennis player”. Sorry about that! I replaced it with a comment that tried to point at the heart of the objection; but since I disagree with the things in your reply, I’ll respond here too.
I think I just disagree with your intuitions here. When someone says Obama is the best person to be president, they are presumably taking into account factors like existing political support and desire to lead, which make it plausible that Obama actually is the best person.
And when people say “X is the best fiction author ever”, I think they do mean to make a claim about the literal probability that this person is, out of all the authors who ever wrote fiction, the best one. In that context, the threshold at which I’d call something a “belief” is much lower than in most contexts, but nevertheless I think that when (for example) a Shakespeare fan says it, they are talking about the proposition that nobody was greater than Shakespeare. And this is not an implausible claim, given how much more we study Shakespeare than anyone else.
(By contrast, if they said: nobody had as much latent talent as Shakespeare, then this would be clearly false).
Anyway, it seems to me that judging the best charitable intervention is much harder than judging the best author, because for the latter you only need to look at books that have already been written, whereas in the former you need to evaluate the space of all interventions, including ones that nobody has proposed yet.
I think you’re saying that my word choice is unusual here for commonsensical intuitions, but I don’t think it is? Tennis is an unusually objective field, with clear metrics and a well-defined competitive system.
When somebody says “I think Barack Obama (or your preferred presidential candidate) is the best man to be president” I highly doubt that they literally mean there’s a >50% chance that of all living America-born citizens >35 years of age, this person will be better at governing the US than everybody else.
Similarly, when somebody says “X is the best fiction author,” I doubt they are expressing >50% credence that of all humans who have ever told a story, X told the best fiction stories.
The reference class is the same as the field. Sorry I was clear. But like you said, there are >7 billion people, so “specific reference member” means something very different than “field overall.”
For future reference, Linch’s comment was in response to a comment of mine which I deleted before Linch replied, in which I used the example of saying “Federer is the best tennis player”. Sorry about that! I replaced it with a comment that tried to point at the heart of the objection; but since I disagree with the things in your reply, I’ll respond here too.
I think I just disagree with your intuitions here. When someone says Obama is the best person to be president, they are presumably taking into account factors like existing political support and desire to lead, which make it plausible that Obama actually is the best person.
And when people say “X is the best fiction author ever”, I think they do mean to make a claim about the literal probability that this person is, out of all the authors who ever wrote fiction, the best one. In that context, the threshold at which I’d call something a “belief” is much lower than in most contexts, but nevertheless I think that when (for example) a Shakespeare fan says it, they are talking about the proposition that nobody was greater than Shakespeare. And this is not an implausible claim, given how much more we study Shakespeare than anyone else.
(By contrast, if they said: nobody had as much latent talent as Shakespeare, then this would be clearly false).
Anyway, it seems to me that judging the best charitable intervention is much harder than judging the best author, because for the latter you only need to look at books that have already been written, whereas in the former you need to evaluate the space of all interventions, including ones that nobody has proposed yet.