Thanks for the clarification! I still feel a bit fuzzy on this line of thought, but hopefully understand a bit better now.
At least on my read, the post seems to discuss a couple different forms of wildness: let’s call them “temporal wildness” (we currently live at an unusually notable time) and “structural wildness” (the world is intuitively wild; the human trajectory is intuitively wild).[1]
I think I still don’t see the relevance of “structural wildness,” for evaluating fishiness arguments. As a silly example: Quantum mechanics is pretty intuitively wild, but the fact that we live in a world where QM is true doesn’t seem to substantially undermine fishiness arguments.
I think I do see, though, how claims about temporal wildness might be relevant. I wonder if this kind of argument feels approximately right to you (or to Holden):
Step 1: A priori, it’s unlikely that we would live even within 10000 years of the most consequential century in human history. However, despite this low prior, we have obviously strong reasons to think it’s at least plausible that we live this close to the HoH. Therefore, let’s say, a reasonable person should assign at least a 20% credence to the (wild) hypothesis: “The HoH will happen within the next 10000 years.”
Step 2: If we suppose that the HoH will happen with the next 10000 years, then a reasonable conditional credence that this century is the HoH should probably be something like 1⁄100. Therefore, it seems, our ‘new prior’ that this century is the HoH should be at least .2*.01 = .002. This is substantially higher than (e.g.) the more non-informative prior that Will’s paper starts with.
Fishiness arguments can obviously still be applied to the hypothesis presented in Step 1, in the usual way. But maybe the difference, here, is that the standard arguments/evidence that lend credibility to the more conservative hypothesis “The HoH will happen within the next 10000” are just pretty obviously robust — which makes it easier to overcome a low prior. Then, once we’ve established the plausibility of the more conservative hypothesis, we can sort of back-chain and use it to bump up our prior in the Strong HoH Hypothesis.
I suppose it also evokes an epistemic notion of wildness, when it describes certain confidence levels as “wild,” but I take it that “wild” here is mostly just a way of saying “irrational”?
Ben, that sounds right to me. I also agree with what Paul said. And my intent was to talk about what you call temporal wildness, not what you call structural wildness.
I agree with both you and Arden that there is a certain sense in which the “conservative” view seems significantly less “wild” than my view, and that a reasonable person could find the “conservative” view significantly more attractive for this reason. But I still want to highlight that it’s an extremely “wild” view in the scheme of things, and I think we shouldn’t impose an inordinate burden of proof on updating from that view to mine.
Thanks for the clarification! I still feel a bit fuzzy on this line of thought, but hopefully understand a bit better now.
At least on my read, the post seems to discuss a couple different forms of wildness: let’s call them “temporal wildness” (we currently live at an unusually notable time) and “structural wildness” (the world is intuitively wild; the human trajectory is intuitively wild).[1]
I think I still don’t see the relevance of “structural wildness,” for evaluating fishiness arguments. As a silly example: Quantum mechanics is pretty intuitively wild, but the fact that we live in a world where QM is true doesn’t seem to substantially undermine fishiness arguments.
I think I do see, though, how claims about temporal wildness might be relevant. I wonder if this kind of argument feels approximately right to you (or to Holden):
Fishiness arguments can obviously still be applied to the hypothesis presented in Step 1, in the usual way. But maybe the difference, here, is that the standard arguments/evidence that lend credibility to the more conservative hypothesis “The HoH will happen within the next 10000” are just pretty obviously robust — which makes it easier to overcome a low prior. Then, once we’ve established the plausibility of the more conservative hypothesis, we can sort of back-chain and use it to bump up our prior in the Strong HoH Hypothesis.
I suppose it also evokes an epistemic notion of wildness, when it describes certain confidence levels as “wild,” but I take it that “wild” here is mostly just a way of saying “irrational”?
Ben, that sounds right to me. I also agree with what Paul said. And my intent was to talk about what you call temporal wildness, not what you call structural wildness.
I agree with both you and Arden that there is a certain sense in which the “conservative” view seems significantly less “wild” than my view, and that a reasonable person could find the “conservative” view significantly more attractive for this reason. But I still want to highlight that it’s an extremely “wild” view in the scheme of things, and I think we shouldn’t impose an inordinate burden of proof on updating from that view to mine.