[ExI] on inflation in long term thinking

[Russell Wallace]

On 8/5/07, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:
>
> If you think, for example, that global warming is a dire threat,
> and I don't, it' doesn't follow that you aren't thinking straight
> or are "letting fear and despair make our decisions for us".
> (Well, yes, probably that's true of *some* people, but it is
> downright un-Christian to assume that it's true for all.)


Different kinds of hypothetical danger generate different responses in
people - we are not Bayesian agents, after all (more on that below). I agree
of course that it would be un-Christian to simply make such assumptions,
which is why I am not doing so - my claims regarding the pitfalls here are
based on first-hand experience; I spent awhile in this trap myself.

(I read a few pages of "The Black Swan", I think it's called, which
> has some very telling anecdotes about making overly detailed plans
> concerning a too uncertain future.  And reading prognostications
> that are even four years old, e.g. "Robotic Nation", causes one to
> see how very quickly our guesses become outdated.)


*nods* The Black Swan is good reading - some of the polemics are skippable,
but Taleb also makes some very good points.

Can't some agreement be reached here simply by each of us
> assigning different probabilities to various risks?  In other words,
> is anything really new here?
>

Partly. I don't think we're disagreeing on values - maybe not everyone here
has exactly the same values, but I would guess close enough to the same for
these purposes. Part of it is different probabilities, but I wince at using
that word, because part of it is also a difference in philosophical
approach. I am not a Bayesian. Oh don't get me wrong, Bayesian reasoning is
normative _where applicable_. But for human beings in the real world (as
opposed to mathematically abstracted agents in a closed-world toy universe),
it usually is not applicable. In the absence of hard statistical data,
"probability" assignments are nothing of the sort, and the kind of errors
Bayes will help you with are on the whole not the kind people actually make.
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