I don’t buy any of the arguments you said at the top of the post, except for toxoplasma of rage (with lowish probability) and evaporative cooling. But both of these (to me) seem like a description of an aspect of a social dynamic, not the aspect. And currently not very decision relevant.
Like, obviously they’re false. But are they useful? I think so!
I’d be interested in different, more interesting or decision relevant or less obvious mistakes you often see.
I suppose I think the example I gave where someone I know doing selections for an important EA program didn’t include questions about altruism because they thought that adverse selection effects were sufficiently bad.
Seems like that is just a bad argument, and can be solved with saying “well that’s obviously wrong for obvious, commonsense reasons” and if they really want to, they can make a spreadsheet, fill it in with the selection pressures they think they’re causing, and see for themselves that indeed its wrong.
The argument I’m making is that most of the examples you gave I thought “that’s a dumb argument”. And if people are consistently making transparently dumb selection arguments, this seems different from people making subtly dumb selection arguments, like economists.
If you have subtly dumb selection arguments, you should go out and test which are true, if you’re making transparently dumb ones, you should figure out how to formulate better hypotheses. Chances are you’re not yet even oriented in the vague direction of reality in the domain you’re attempting to reason in.
I don’t buy any of the arguments you said at the top of the post, except for toxoplasma of rage (with lowish probability) and evaporative cooling. But both of these (to me) seem like a description of an aspect of a social dynamic, not the aspect. And currently not very decision relevant.
Like, obviously they’re false. But are they useful? I think so!
I’d be interested in different, more interesting or decision relevant or less obvious mistakes you often see.
I suppose I think the example I gave where someone I know doing selections for an important EA program didn’t include questions about altruism because they thought that adverse selection effects were sufficiently bad.
Seems like that is just a bad argument, and can be solved with saying “well that’s obviously wrong for obvious, commonsense reasons” and if they really want to, they can make a spreadsheet, fill it in with the selection pressures they think they’re causing, and see for themselves that indeed its wrong.
The argument I’m making is that most of the examples you gave I thought “that’s a dumb argument”. And if people are consistently making transparently dumb selection arguments, this seems different from people making subtly dumb selection arguments, like economists.
If you have subtly dumb selection arguments, you should go out and test which are true, if you’re making transparently dumb ones, you should figure out how to formulate better hypotheses. Chances are you’re not yet even oriented in the vague direction of reality in the domain you’re attempting to reason in.