Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my...
Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
Not sure I agree, but then again, there's no clear nailed-down target to disagree with :p
For particular people's behaviour in a social environment, there's a high prior that the true explanation is complex. That doesn't nail down which complex story we should update towards, so there's still more probability mass in any individual simpler story than in individual complex stories. But what it does mean is that if someone gives you a complex story, you shouldn't be surprised that the story is complex and therefore reduce your trust in them--at least not by much.
(Actually, I guess sometimes, if someone gives you a simple story, and the prior on complex true stories is really high, you should distrust them more. )
To be clear, if someone has a complex story for why they did what they did, you can penalise that particular story for its complexity, but you should already be expecting whatever story they produce to be complex. In other words, if your prior distribution over how complex their story will be is nearly equal to your posterior distribution (the complexity of their story roughly fits your expectations), then however much you think complexity should update your trust in people, you should already have been distrusting them approximately that much based on your prior. Conservation of expected evidence!