You point to your survey data saying that cis gay men are autoandrophilic as something Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence can't explain, but I don't see my theory as being particularly committed to making predictions about how gay men will answer the "Picture a very attractive man [...]" question. It's a different population!
I would totally respect it if you were merely _uncertain_ about the AGP→gender-ID _vs._ gender-ID→AGP causality; I can't expect everyone to share my parsimony intuitions. But on Discord, you said "it just seemed totally wrong"! I just don't think that's something you can possibly conclude based on how _other populations_ are answering similar survey questions!
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+> We have a debate every year over whether 50% predictions are meaningful in this paradigm; feel free to continue it.
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+Someone reading this who trusted Alexander as a general-purpose intellectual authority ("the best of us", the "rationalists") might walk away with the idea that it's an open problem whether 50% binary predictions are meaningful—perhaps reasoning, if the immortal Scott Alexander doesn't know, then who am I to know?
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+But it's not. On this website, [Rafael Harth explains why 50% isn't special](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DAc4iuy4D3EiNBt9B/how-to-evaluate-50-predictions). I claim that this should actually be pretty obvious to competent quantitative thinkers, even if it's not obvious to the collective _SSC_/_ACX_ commentariat, and Alexander can't tell which of his commenters are competent quantitative thinkers.
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+I don't particularly fault Scott for this: [by his own admission, he's not a math guy](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/). (And the vast majority of math people can't write as well or as fast as Scott. No one is the best at everything!) Rather, I'm saying that a culture that wants to _actually_ be right about everything would do better to _just_ focus on being right on the object level, without [wireheading on its own promises of being right about everything](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/).
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+(Incidentally, Scott himself is actually very good about [not trying to claim more authority than is actually justified by his performance](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/). His fans should try to be more like him along this dimension!)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff