Conversation

Replying to and
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." — Emerson This effect I think is about both ensemble and time consistency. Rigid dogma across ensemble leading to inflexibility across time.
This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more
This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more
This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more
I don’t think it’s just a social effect. There’s an epistemological component. Situationist models have salient local contextual data that might be intractable to make consistent beyond a “it depends” or “case by case” vacuous ensemble consistency.
This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more
Depends on the scope, doesn't it? If our belief set consists of 1 belief like "all traffic offenders should be given a ticket" you might hit 90%. If it consists of a looser meta belief like "treat people kindly" that stands in for a dozen conflicting behavior norms, it gets messy
1
Replying to and
Low-paradigm fields like modern anthropology have a particularist bias and suspicion of even empiricist triage theorizing of the "90%" type, let alone grand conceptual theories. While naive economists often have unreasonably consistent belief in market efficiency.
1
Replying to and
A good way to consider ergodicity potential here is to simply think of case space as a different kind of time. You have a belief B on day t, based on case k. B(t,k) might need an update both for B(t+1,k) and for B(t, k+1).
1
Replying to and
Is the situation more stable in time or case-space? It is not clear to me that different default assumptions for time/case-space are warranted. Your original heuristic amounts to "beliefs are more likely to be invalidated by new data over time than by new cases in scope"
1
Replying to and
Of course, invalidation via new cases also takes time, since case-space takes time to traverse, but you might never explore. So there is a time-scale separation. Backpacking to meet different types of people and broaden your mind is more traversing case space than time for eg.
This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more
I think my summary position is that ensemble consistency and time consistency are equally suspicious behaviors without knowing the speed of exploration. Basically, my rewrite of your original heuristic would be: "don't trust beliefs of non-active learners"
1
Show replies