When I made my comment, I think I kind-of had in mind “negative total effect”, rather than “at least one negative effect, whether or not it’s offset”. But I don’t think I’d explicitly thought about the distinction (which is a bit silly), and my comment doesn’t make it totally clear what I meant, so it’s a good question.
I think my 80% confidence interval probably wouldn’t include an overall negative impact of the writeup. But I think my 95% confidence interval would.
Reasons why my 80% confidence interval probably wouldn’t include an overall negative impact of the writeup, despite what I said in my previous comment:
I think we should have some degree of confidence that, if there’s more public discussion by people with fairly good epistemics and good epistemic and discussion norms, that’ll tend to update people towards more accurate beliefs.
(Not every time, but more often than it does the opposite.)
As such, I think we should start off skeptical of claims like “An EA Forum post that influenced people’s beliefs and behaviours substantially influenced those things in a bad way, even though in theory someone else could’ve pointed that out convincingly and thus prevented that influence.”
And then there’s also the fact that Gleave later got a role on the LTFF, suggesting he’s probably good at reasoning about these things.
And there’s also my object-level positive impressions of ALLFED.
Yeah, I see what you’re saying. Do you think that it is hard for the writeup to have a negative total effect?
When I made my comment, I think I kind-of had in mind “negative total effect”, rather than “at least one negative effect, whether or not it’s offset”. But I don’t think I’d explicitly thought about the distinction (which is a bit silly), and my comment doesn’t make it totally clear what I meant, so it’s a good question.
I think my 80% confidence interval probably wouldn’t include an overall negative impact of the writeup. But I think my 95% confidence interval would.
Reasons why my 80% confidence interval probably wouldn’t include an overall negative impact of the writeup, despite what I said in my previous comment:
I think we should have some degree of confidence that, if there’s more public discussion by people with fairly good epistemics and good epistemic and discussion norms, that’ll tend to update people towards more accurate beliefs.
(Not every time, but more often than it does the opposite.)
As such, I think we should start off skeptical of claims like “An EA Forum post that influenced people’s beliefs and behaviours substantially influenced those things in a bad way, even though in theory someone else could’ve pointed that out convincingly and thus prevented that influence.”
And then there’s also the fact that Gleave later got a role on the LTFF, suggesting he’s probably good at reasoning about these things.
And there’s also my object-level positive impressions of ALLFED.
I have nothing to disagree about here :)