- Even inadequate systems only have a finite amount of failure
- Sloppy cynicism will usually be wrong because the system isn’t as broken as the completely cynical view would have it be
- Seeing inadequacy everywhere is functionally as bad never seeing inadequacy
- The point of learning inadequacy analysis is to give yourself permission to try novel strategies while having an understanding of where those strategies are likely to work
- Break blind trust in institutions
- Also learn where institutions are likely to be correct
- Three step process:
- Break blind trust in institutions
- Calibrate until you’re not always seeing exploitability or inexploitability
- Fine tune against reality
- When we think about inadequacy, we’re deciding whether we trust society to be more or less competent than we are
- The “modest” viewpoint turns competence into a marker of social status
- Doing better implies being better
- However, our beliefs should not be determined by what sort of person we are – they should be determined by the state of the world
- The true alternative to modest epistemology isn’t an “immodest” epistemology, where you think you know better than society
- The true alternative is to realize that society doesn’t always know better and then decide for yourself on a case-by-case basis
- Realize that often will perform worse (on a per-case basis) because of misaligned incentives
- It takes far less effort to identify a correct expert than it does to become a correct expert
- When looking for exploitability, pick your battles - it’s easy to think that a system in inadequate and exploitable when it’s not
- Coming up with a truly novel model is something you’ll only do once or twice in your lifetime
- A brand new synthesis of pre-existing ideas is something that’ll happen to you once or twice a year
- Picking between differing experts when you can follow their arguments is something that you can do quite frequently
- Fortunately most day-to-day decisions don’t require the creation of novel models or new syntheses - finding the “right” expert is usually sufficient
- To improve everyday thinking about inadequacy
- Update hard every time you come across new data
- Don’t worry so much about overcorrecting - as long as you leave yourself open to new data, additional input will cause you to correct back
- Bet real money on everything - don’t have to bet a lot, but the process of betting makes the prediction “real”
- Being a “fox” in the Isaiah Berlin sense shouldn’t preclude you from building models
- Build theoretical frameworks, and then abandon them when reality proves them wrong
- The ideology of empiricism is harmful if it prevents you from making predictions or inferences
- Being cognizant of the outside view is helpful but make sure that the outside view is actually applicable to your situation
- In many novel situations, there are multiple plausible outside views
- It’s not trivial to figure out which reference class is most applicable
- In many cases (especially in the sciences) the outside view can’t compete with a good model
- The fact that you’ll have to give up the theory if it’s proven wrong shouldn’t prevent you from building the theory