[somethingAlex]

I'm surprised how many people are just nitpicking the examples like they are supposed to be rigorous analogies.

The point that I walked away with is that oftentimes experts use these same heuristics even when people assume they are not. People think that experts don't have to use them because they have better tools and skills at their disposal. However, for reasons involving human factors, they oftentimes do use them. Finally, these opinions then get thrown into the body of evidence as if they are ground truth values.

[lemmsjid]

I wanted to take the overall point but I did get bogged down in the examples. The overall tone of the essay is philosophical and allegorical. For an essay with that tone to really make its point it needs to be crystalline in its clarity and feel a real depth of reasoning, otherwise it will lose the reader. Instead it makes rather extreme points in the examples that don't have to do with what I imagine the author wants you to take from the essay. Specifically, the whole business about there being no point to the existence of the people involved. That invites nit-picking ("the security guard is still valuable because they're there! The doctor can still diagnose obvious ailments!"). Then there's the aside about the different Covid treatments, which basically feels like a dig to people who in real life probably took a serious look at the differing treatments before discarding them. These things distract from the much more interesting point that aggregating opinions from experts will not necessarily increase the certainty of the opinion. I think behind this essay is a way better revision where the author has taken a lot of the feedback from these responses and done another draft. In the meantime it doesn't achieve its desired effect as a piece of writing.

Another commenter left what I thought was a rather essential analogy which was whether or not people should run from the hint of a tiger. Running too little invites tiger attack. Running too much invites excessive anxiety. Both have health ramifications: too little fight or flight response and a creature is easy prey, too much fight or flight response and the creature is expending too much energy in the fight or flight state. If the bushes rustle in the right way next to a herd of antelope, the herd will run, and the size of the herd doesn't act as a linear multiplier on the chance that there is a tiger. To follow the analogy rather painfully, the OP article is critiquing the members of the herd who would say, "Don't run, idiot, there's no tiger", when there's an equal critique to be made against the members of the herd who run all the time and are in a constant state of anxiety.

[_Nat_]

A simpler analogy may've been a smoke-detector that doesn't actually activate when there's smoke. It'd be cheap, super-efficient (no battery needed!), light-weight, no false-alarms, and still usually work correctly 100% of the time for most people.

Another simple analogy may've been a regularized neural-network that's super-efficient because it always returns a nominal-result, not needing to do any calculations. It could work ~>99.9% of the time because the nominal-result is ~>99.9% prevalent.

The author was trying to point out scenarios where lazy-neglect may seem viable. By contrast, some readers may want to give those in the examples the benefit-of-the-doubt, as they might actually be taking no-action as a conscientious decision. While we often want to give folks the benefit-of-the-doubt, that's presumably not how the author intended those examples to be read.

The author was presumably trying to paint pictures in which folks might thrive through neglectful practices, rather than trying to characterize all folks who superficially resemble those in the thought-experiments as being neglectful.

[wutbrodo]

> For an essay with that tone to really make its point it needs to be crystalline in its clarity and feel a real depth of reasoning, otherwise it will lose the reader.

This has a lot to do with the community he's part of and still implicitly writes for. He's blown up in recent years, but the blog still has a strong core readerbase of people with significantly longer attention spans than the average person, among other things. In all the years I've read his work, the meandering, often-humorous examples are half the fun, which makes the discovery of the thesis more enjoyable as well.

[itsdrewmiller]

No evidence is provided that any experts are doing this - not sure where you got "oftentimes" from.