I am sometimes happy making pretty broad and sloppy statements. For example: “People making political predictions typically don’t make enough use of ‘outside view’ perspectives” feels fine to me, as a claim, despite some ambiguity around the edges. (Which perspectives should they use? How exactly should they use them? Etc.)
I guess we can just agree to disagree on that for now. The example statement you gave would feel fine to me if it used the original meaning of “outside view” but not the new meaning, and since many people don’t know (or sometimes forget) the original meaning…
A good conversation would focus specifically on the conditions under which it makes sense to defer heavily to experts, whether those conditions apply in this particular case, etc. Some general Tetlock stuff might come into the conversation, like: “Tetlock’s work suggests it’s easy to trip yourself up if you try to use your own detailed/causal model of the world to make predictions, so you shouldn’t be so confident that your own ‘inside view’ prediction will be very good either.” But mostly you should be more specific.
100% agreement here, including on the bolded bit.
I think some parts of the community lean too much on things in the bag (the example you give at the top of the post is an extreme example). I also think that some parts of the community lean too little on things in the bag, in part because (in my view) they’re overconfident in their own abilities to reason causally/deductively in certain domains. I’m not sure which is overall more problematic, at the moment, in part because I’m not sure how people actually should be integrating different considerations in domains like AI forecasting.
Also agree here, but again I don’t really care which one is overall more problematic because I think we have more precise concepts we can use and it’s more helpful to use them instead of these big bags.
There also seem to be biases that cut in both directions. I think the ‘baseline bias’ is pretty strongly toward causal/deductive reasoning, since it’s more impressive-seeming, can suggest that you have something uniquely valuable to bring to the table (if you can draw on lots of specific knowledge or ideas that it’s rare to possess), is probably typically more interesting and emotionally satisfying, and doesn’t as strongly force you to confront or admit the limits of your predictive powers. The EA community has definitely introduced an (unusual?) bias in the opposite direction, by giving a lot of social credit to people who show certain signs of ‘epistemic virtue.’ I guess the pro-causal/deductive bias often feels more salient to me, but I don’t really want to make any confident claim here that it actually is more powerful.
I think I agree with all this as well, noting that this causal/deductive reasoning definition of inside view isn’t necessarily what other people mean by inside view, and also isn’t necessarily what Tetlock meant. I encourage you to use the term “causal/deductive reasoning” instead of “inside view,” as you did here, it was helpful (e.g. if you had instead used “inside view” I would not have agreed with the claim about baseline bias)
I guess we can just agree to disagree on that for now. The example statement you gave would feel fine to me if it used the original meaning of “outside view” but not the new meaning, and since many people don’t know (or sometimes forget) the original meaning…
100% agreement here, including on the bolded bit.
Also agree here, but again I don’t really care which one is overall more problematic because I think we have more precise concepts we can use and it’s more helpful to use them instead of these big bags.
I think I agree with all this as well, noting that this causal/deductive reasoning definition of inside view isn’t necessarily what other people mean by inside view, and also isn’t necessarily what Tetlock meant. I encourage you to use the term “causal/deductive reasoning” instead of “inside view,” as you did here, it was helpful (e.g. if you had instead used “inside view” I would not have agreed with the claim about baseline bias)