[extropy-chat] Re: Overconfidence and meta-rationality

[Russell Wallace]

On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 00:47:53 -0800 (PST), "Hal Finney" <hal at finney.org> wrote:
> Even if you do follow these predicted behaviors, you would still be right
> to argue (or at least vigorously discuss) the reasons why your copy came
> to such a dramatically different result than you did.  You want to pool
> your information and come up with the best quality estimate based on
> everything you two learned during the year.  And it may well be that the
> best way to do that is for the one to defend the 0.1 estimate while the
> other defends 0.9, each based on what they learned.

I agree completely; Eliezer and I did this some months ago, for
example, regarding the feasibility of hard takeoff. Now we're both
smart people who've studied the issue carefully, and come to different
conclusions, so what was the rational thing for us to do? Answer: each
of us argued our case until we boiled it down to flat difference of
intuitions, whereupon we nodded, "Now I see why you believe what you
do - go ahead and prove me wrong."

(Well, that's what I said, since he's the optimist on that one. He's
probably hoping I _don't_ prove him wrong :))

- Russell