EA - Say how much, not more or less versus someone else by Gregory Lewis

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Say how much, not more or less versus someone else, published by Gregory Lewis on December 29, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Or: "Underrated/overrated" discourse is itself overrated.BLUF: "X is overrated", "Y is neglected", "Z is a weaker argument than people think", are all species of second-order evaluations: we are not directly offering an assessment of X, Y, or Z, but do so indirectly by suggesting another assessment, offered by someone else, needs correcting up or down.I recommend everyone cut this habit down ~90% in aggregate for topics they deem important, replacing the great majority of second-order evaluations with first-order evaluations. Rather than saying whether you think X is over/under rated (etc.) just try and say how good you think X is.The perils of second-order evaluationSuppose I say "I think forecasting is underrated". Presumably I mean something like:I think forecasting should be rated this highly (e.g. 8/10 or whatever)I think others rate forecasting lower than this (e.g. 5/10 on average or whatever)So I think others are not rating forecasting highly enough.Yet whether "Forecasting is overrated" is true or not depends on more than just "how good is forecasting?" It is confounded by questions of which 'others' I have in mind, and what their views actually are. E.g.:Maybe you disagree with me - you think forecasting is overrated - but it turns out we basically agree on how good forecasting is. Our apparent disagreement arises because you happen to hang out in more pro-forecasting environments than I do.Or maybe we hang out in similar circles, but we disagree in how to assess the prevailing vibes. We basically agree on how good forecasting is, but differ on what our mutual friends tend to really think about it.(Obviously, you could also get specious agreement of two-wrongs-make-a-right variety: you agree with me forecasting is underrated despite having a much lower opinion of it than I do, because you assess third parties having an even lower opinion still)These are confounders as they confuse the issue we (usually) care about: how good or bad forecasting is, not the inaccuracy of others nor in which direction they err re. how good they think forecasting is.One can cut through this murk by just assessing the substantive issue directly. I offer my take on how good forecasting is: if folks agree with me, it seems people generally weren't over or under- rating forecasting after all. If folks disagree, we can figure out - in the course of figuring out how good forecasting is - whether one of us is over/under rating it versus the balance of reason, not versus some poorly scribed subset of prevailing opinion. No phantom third parties to the conversation are needed - or helpful to - this exercise.In praise of (kind-of) objectivity, precision, and concretenessThis is easier said than done. In the forecasting illustration above, I stipulated 'marks out of ten' as an assessment of the 'true value'. This is still vague: if I say forecasting is '8/10', that could mean a wide variety of things - including basically agreeing with you despite you giving a different number to me. What makes something 8/10 versus 7/10 here?It is still a step in the right direction. Although my '8/10' might be essentially the same as your '7/10', there probably some substantive difference between 8/10 and 5/10, or 4/10 and 6/10. It is still better than second order evaluation, which adds another source of vagueness: although saying for myself forecasting is X/10 is tricky, it is still harder to do this exercise on someone else's (or everyone else's) behalf.And we need not stop there. Rather than some singular measure like 'marks out of 10' for 'forecasting' as a whole, maybe we have some specific evalution or recommendation in mind.Perhaps: "Most members o...