[smcl]

I've seen this on here before. Guys convincing themselves that they're being rational and you're being emotional - because they put little numbers besides their feelings and perform some calculations to produce a percentage that "proves" their theory about Antivax stuff, Putin/Ukraine or whatever is credible.

[heavyset_go]

It's a shibboleth in rationalist circles who convince themselves/others that they're doing Bayesian inference in their heads.

[ben_w]

Anyone who thinks rationality and emotion are mutually exclusive, hasn't understood half of what any of the big names in that area wrote.

Which isn't to say you or the other replies next to mine are wrong — any memes that get shared also get misunderstood, including attempts to be… less wrong.

(Putting numbers on my uncertainty has mainly made me aware that I'm bad at it, which is useful to be aware of even if it doesn't make me better at it).

[itsoktocry]

>their theory about Antivax stuff, Putin/Ukraine or whatever is credible.

Your politics are revealed with your choice of examples here.

Who needs a decision-making mental model when we can just trust what the experts tell us about these things, or maybe "trust your gut"? That's never failed.

[smcl]

> Your politics are revealed

My beliefs and my politics are pretty transparent in my comment history, I'm not trying to avoid them being "revealed" whatsoever.

> Who needs a decision-making mental model when we can just trust what the experts tell us about these things, or maybe "trust your gut"? That's never failed

Not me? I saw people applying the methods we're talking about to convince themselves that the likelihood of their pet conspiracy theory is true is around the same as a coin toss. You can reach bone-headed conclusions if you're determined to do so, whether you use some decision-making mental model or not.

[throwanem]

That's a false binary. "I don't have enough information to form an opinion here" and "I feel like that guy's probably full of shit, though" are in no way mutually exclusive.

[EthanHeilman]

I agree with the main claim you are making here. That decision-making models are important an aspect to minimizing the chance of failure when considering decisions. Nothing I said is an attempt to contradict your main claim.

> Your politics are revealed with your choice of examples here [Antivax stuff, Putin/Ukraine or whatever is credible].

I understand that antivax has been claimed by the mainstream right (there are antivaxers on the far-left but they have limited influence), but it feels like I'm living in some bizarro world that people see the efficacy of vaccination as being "political." It feels like I'm living a ham-handed allegorical story about dangers of irrationalism.

> Who needs a decision-making mental model when we can just trust what the experts tell us about these things, or maybe "trust your gut"? That's never failed.

I'd argue that trusting your gut or trusting experts are both decision-making models. They both work well within the right context and fail outside those contexts.

* Trusting your gut is often the right option when you have to make an immediate decision and you don't have time to weight the various options. Something weird is happening on the highway ahead of me should I break now? I have 0.3 seconds to decide.

* Trusting the experts works if the experts are experts in that field and that experts in that field have a long track record of correct predictions and the experts are talking to are in fact experts in that field and have access to the level data which has rendered correct predictions in the data. I'd assign a near 100% probability to a statement by an astronomer that tomorrow night will be a full moon over Toronto, I'd be less likely to assign a high probability to a physicist saying that this new experiment they have will detect sterile neutrinos.

Even those fields in which I am an expert in, I weigh the claims of other subject matter experts when I do not have the time to do the necessary reading and work. The biggest problem with trusting experts is determining is a particular "expert" is actually an expert in that field when you are non-expert in that field.

[whimsicalism]

It comes from lesswrong/rationalist circles.

Best to ignore people once you have identified that they are on the wrong side of the Dunning-Kruger curve

[jeltz]

No, let's not. I have seen examples here on HN where leading experts in the relevant field have been accused of Dunning-Kruger (I recognized the usernames, the accusers obviously did not). Such accusations are just namecalling and destroy any civilized debate.

[whimsicalism]

Should we be reasoning from last usages of a phrase that you didn’t like or the particular context here?