Using Points to Rate Different Kinds of Evidence

By Ozzie Gooen @ 2023-08-25T19:26 (+33)

Epistemic Status: Briefly written. The specific equation here captures my quick intuition  - this is meant primarily as a demonstration. 

There’s a lot of discussion on the EA Forum and LessWrong about epistemics, evidence, and updating.

I don’t know of many attempts at formalizing our thinking here into concrete tables or equations. Here is one (very rough and simplistic) attempt. I’d be excited to see much better versions.

Equation

Initial Points

Scientific Evidence

20 - A simple math proof proves X

8 - A published scientific study in Economics supporting X

6 - A published scientific study in Psychology supporting X

Market Prediction

14 - Popular stock markets strongly suggest X

11 - Prediction markets claim X, with 20 equivalent hours of research

10 - A poll shows that 90% of LessWrong believe X

6 - Prediction markets claim X, with one equivalent hour of research

Expert Opinion

8 - An esteemed academic believes X, where it’s directly in their line of work

6 - The author has strong emotions about X

Reasoning

6 - There's a (20-100 node) numeric model that shows X

5 - A reasonable analogy between X and something clearly good/bad

4 - A long-standing proverb

Personal Accounts

5 - The author claims a long personal history that demonstrates X

3 - Someone in the world has strong emotions about X

2 - A clever remark, meme, or tweet

2.3 - An insanely clever, meme, or tweet

0 - Believing X is claimed to be personally beneficial

Tradition / Use

12 - Top businesses act as if X

8 - A long-standing social tradition about X

5 - A single statistic about X

Point Modifiers

Is this similar to existing evidence?
Subtract the similarity from the extra amount of evidence. This likely will remove most of the evidence value.

Is it convenient for the source to believe or say X?
-10% to -90%

Is there a lot of money or effort put behind spreading this evidence? For example, as an advertising campaign? 
+5% to +40%

How credible is the author or source?
-100% to +30%

Do we suspect the source is goodharting on this scale?
-20%

Points, In Practice

Evidence Points, as outlined, are not trying to mimic mathematical bits of information or another clean existing unit. I attempted to find a compromise between accuracy and ease of use.

Meta

Using an Equations for Discussion

The equation above is rough, but at least it’s (somewhat) precise and upfront. This represents much information, and any part can easily be argued against.

I think such explicitness could help with epistemic conversations.

Compare:

“Smart people should generally use their inside view, instead of the outside view” vs. “My recommended points scores for inside-view style evidence, and my point scores for outside-view style evidence, are all listed below.”

“Using many arguments is better than one big argument” vs. “I’ve adjusted my point table function to produce higher values when multiple types of evidence are provided. You can see it returns values 30% higher than what others have provided for certain scenarios.”

“It’s really important to respect top [intellectuals|scientists|EAs]” vs. “My score for respected [intellectuals|scientists|EAs] is 2 points higher than the current accepted average.”

“Chesterton’s Fence is something to pay a lot of attention to” vs. “See my score table the points from various kinds of traditional practices.”

In a better world, different academic schools of thought could have their own neatly listed tables/functions. In an even better world, all of these functions would be forecasts of future evaluators.

Presumptions

This sort of point system makes some presumptions that might be worth flagging. Primarily, it claims that even really poor evidence is evidence.

I often see people throwing out low-informative evidence as completely worthless. I think this take is misguided. The antidote to a poor argument isn’t to mistakingly claim that the argument is entirely worthless - it’s typically to provide better counter-evidence.

Agreeing on an evidence-weighing algorithm before direct discussions

In classical debate, after choosing a side, debaters will talk up the importance of the sorts of evidence that they might happen to have and dismiss the sorts of evidence their opponents bring up.

This becomes particularly gnarly when a group (like a political interest) goes through a long list of heated discussions on different topics. In each, they’re likely to gerrymander their effective evidence points rankings in order to most benefit their argument.

An obvious epistemic improvement would be for parties to declare consistent epistemologies upfront. An even better state might involve parties agreeing on some shared aggregation of their epistemic preferences. Aggregate epistemics, not policy beliefs.

In some worlds, intellectuals would spend most of their time improving epistemic processes and revealing unbiased evidence. A book about tax reform might be rewarded based on how many total points of evidence it brings up, regardless of which side of the debate those points are on.

Is this too complicated and speculative?

As long-time readers will know, I’m a big fan of attempting to measure highly speculative concepts. I guess explicit and speculative models are often preferable to standard text discussions. There’s a potential danger that some people might over-trust these numbers because they are numbers. However, the alternative to modeling is often “lots of blog posts with different undefined ontologies and tons of misunderstanding,” so I think this is often a reasonable tradeoff.

One great thing about models is that you can improve them. As we get more evidence and opinions, I’m hopeful that eventually, models emerge that wind up being pretty okay. If you kill mediocre attempts, you likely eventually kill decent ones, too.

Future Work

This is basic now, but I think it illustrates a worthy goal. Potential future work (for someone, likely not us) would include:

Thanks to Nuño Sempere for discussion on this topic. You can also see a short attempt by him on something similar here.

Afterward: Quick Attempts by LLMS

I fed this post to Claude and ChatGPT to have them provide simple takes.

Claude

Scientific Evidence

Expert Opinion

Reasoning

Records

Culture

GPT-4

Experimental Evidence (Evidence from controlled experiments or scientific studies)

Empirical Evidence (Evidence based on observation or experience)

Expert Testimony and Opinion

Anecdotal and Personal Accounts

Historical and Archival Evidence

Logical and Theoretical Evidence

Public Opinion and Mass Media

Miscellaneous

This system offers a broader range of evidence types, especially those under 10 points, to capture the nuances of everyday information sources.

david_reinstein @ 2023-08-28T18:58 (+4)

Could you explain this a bit more? It's very shorthand, and hard to know what you are doing and what you are asking us. I think I have a lot of comments, but for most of them I worry I might be missing the point.

E.g., a math proof is something different than scientific evidence, and it generally applies in different domains. If I have confidence in the proof itself (i.e., proof not in error), that would make any other evidence moot. However, in most relevant cases the 'math proof' is a proof of something that is only a very simplified model of the question at hand.

Aryeh Englander @ 2023-08-25T22:39 (+3)

This is great! Just wanted to mention that this kind of weighting approach works very well with the recent post A Model-based Approach to AI Existential Risk, by Sammy Martin, Lonnie Chrisman, and myself, particularly the section on Combining inside and outside view arguments. Excited to see more work in this area!

Ozzie Gooen @ 2023-08-25T20:10 (+2)

Quick flag/reminder that I'd be interested in comments from others here - try giving your own scores, or flag things that you think are wrong about mine (or an LLMs). 

titotal @ 2023-08-26T16:43 (+1)

I think this is a reasonable exercise in the abstract, and could help people more easily communicate how they approach different forms of evidence. 

However, if actually implemented practically, I think it would be too easily gamed to be of any use. Using your system as an example, if person A has a mathematical proof of X (20 points), but person B makes 11 clever tweets suggesting not x (2*11 = 22 points), then person B "wins" the argument. 

The other problem I see is that there's no modifier here for "actually being correct". If person A presents a correct mathematical proof for X, and person B presents a mathematical proof for not X that is actually false, do they both get 20 points? 

Chris Kerr @ 2023-09-07T02:40 (+3)

The other problem I see is that there's no modifier here for "actually being correct". If person A presents a correct mathematical proof for X, and person B presents a mathematical proof for not X that is actually false, do they both get 20 points? 

If you check the proofs yourself and you can see that one is obviously wrong and the other is not obviously (to you) wrong then you only give the not-obviously-wrong one 20 points. If you can't tell which is wrong then they cancel out. If a professor then comes along and says "that proof is wrong, because [reason that you can't understand], but the other one is OK" then epistemically it boils down to "tenured academic in field - 6 points" for the proof that the professor says is OK.

Ozzie Gooen @ 2023-08-26T17:03 (+2)

This equation was definitely meant as a rough initial guide. I think it's still usable as a heuristic - i.e. most of the time, you pay attention to higher point evidence than lower point evidence. It's meant to be better than other heuristics, not a complete solution.

if person A has a mathematical proof of X (20 points), but person B makes 11 clever tweets suggesting not x (2*11 = 22 points), then person B "wins" the argument. 

I didn't get into adding evidence, for this reason. I think it's very clear that things are not linearly-additive like that. I think that an aggregation function would take into account the similarity of different sorts of content (two tweets that are clever, but near-identical), but also the similarity of the types of content (it's better to have a diverse set of different kinds of content, like a meta-study and "businesses commonly use it"). There would be quick leveling off - so that 50 tweets would have the evidence strength of something like 2 to 5 or so. 

The other problem I see is that there's no modifier here for "actually being correct".

I thought this was fairly obvious to add. Again, I think this would need a lot more complexity, depending on how much you actually rely on it.