I’ve been spending a lot of time on the road talking to @oscredwin, and I’m realizing that we have very different intuitions around speculating under uncertainty.
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We both believe hard data over sketchy ideas, of course. But he’s more willing than me to make predictions based on economic concepts or other verbalizable models when he doesn’t know specifics, whereas that feels way too sketchy for me.
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Conversely, I’m more willing to generalize from anecdotes and believe my “vibe” hunches about cultural zeitgeists and human psychology, and that stuff feels fake to him.
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Interestingly, we both feel *bored* by speculations that seem ungrounded, like “that’s a dead end, it can’t yield fruit, can we talk about something else now?”
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One big difference is that I consistently expect bigger gaps between “far-mode” stuff I learned in books and “near-mode” stuff I can observe firsthand than Andrew does.
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On an S1 level I just *don’t expect* the sorts of things books & schools tell you to do, like take vitamins or wash your hands, to make a difference big enough to notice in your own life.
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Eg I was *surprised* to find out firsthand that modular code really is easier to debug, that aspirin really can relieve pain, and that “the greenhouse effect” actually does make sunny indoor rooms hot.
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I think I have a default assumption that the stuff authority figures tell you is pretty likely to be false. I wasn’t “an atheist” till I was an adult but I totally did “belief in belief” as long as I could remember; I believed because I thought that was what good people did.
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Andrew, on the other hand, doesn’t do that effortless thing of “yeah Officially X but I don’t really expect to personally rely on X.” If he believes something, he believes it “in real life”; otherwise it’s phony.
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This means
@oscredwin has higher intellectual integrity than me; you *shouldn’t* have separate magisteria, in principle. Everything should be consistent with everything else, in the end.1 reply 0 retweets 5 likesShow this thread
OTOH I think my intuition and “vibes” are *accurately pointing to stuff he can’t perceive* about how often people are bullshitting and how trustworthy authorities are. There’s probably false things that he *actually believes* that I wouldn’t outright deny but I wouldn’t bet on.
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This is a pretty canonical gender difference: men (speaking roughly) are more principled and women are more sensitive to signals of incongruence/insincerity, but we don’t really know how to articulate what we perceive in ways that don’t sound super “woo” or “crazy.”
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