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Just realized this is an actual filter for me. Confidence at the wrong abstraction level makes me tune people out very rapidly. Kinda like an idiot’s idea of projecting decisive leadership.
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Logging an idea that seems important for future reference. A lot of shaky thinking is marked by what @bysl referred to as “confidence at the wrong abstraction level”
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Would the people vigorously agreeing with you all agree what you're talking about? Perhaps they are too confident at tWAL? I for onehave no idea what you mean, wisely unconfident as I am at this AbsLev. Can you explain in a little skit with sock puppets and song?
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Oh, genius. I've been kinda wondering why he rubs me the wrong way for a decade, and settled on some linear combination of "blowhard," "fixed point of aging broscience practice", and "bad-faith argument". Those are probably all different low-dim projections of OverConfAtWAbsLev.
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A simpler example is a line like “masks don’t work” trotted out unironically rather than as political bait. Some people mean it as a simple declarative approximation. Others don’t seem to realize that there are half a dozen stochastic variables and confidence levels in there.
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