This equation was definitely meant as a rough initial guide. I think it’s still usable as a heuristic—i.e. most of the time, you pay attention to higher point evidence than lower point evidence. It’s meant to be better than other heuristics, not a complete solution.
if person A has a mathematical proof of X (20 points), but person B makes 11 clever tweets suggesting not x (2*11 = 22 points), then person B “wins” the argument.
I didn’t get into adding evidence, for this reason. I think it’s very clear that things are not linearly-additive like that. I think that an aggregation function would take into account the similarity of different sorts of content (two tweets that are clever, but near-identical), but also the similarity of the types of content (it’s better to have a diverse set of different kinds of content, like a meta-study and “businesses commonly use it”). There would be quick leveling off—so that 50 tweets would have the evidence strength of something like 2 to 5 or so.
The other problem I see is that there’s no modifier here for “actually being correct”.
I thought this was fairly obvious to add. Again, I think this would need a lot more complexity, depending on how much you actually rely on it.
This equation was definitely meant as a rough initial guide. I think it’s still usable as a heuristic—i.e. most of the time, you pay attention to higher point evidence than lower point evidence. It’s meant to be better than other heuristics, not a complete solution.
I didn’t get into adding evidence, for this reason. I think it’s very clear that things are not linearly-additive like that. I think that an aggregation function would take into account the similarity of different sorts of content (two tweets that are clever, but near-identical), but also the similarity of the types of content (it’s better to have a diverse set of different kinds of content, like a meta-study and “businesses commonly use it”). There would be quick leveling off—so that 50 tweets would have the evidence strength of something like 2 to 5 or so.
I thought this was fairly obvious to add. Again, I think this would need a lot more complexity, depending on how much you actually rely on it.