Sometimes you can believe the right thing for the wrong reason.

I’ve made a cast a while back about whether being right for the wrong reasons —a Gettier problem— qualifies as being truly right.

My SOLH is that we need to stop listening to people whose correct predictions turn out to be entirely coincidental, while they demonstrably didn’t understand the underlying drivers

Philosophy

If I predict rain tomorrow based on satellite and radar imagery showing a cold front forming, and it does rain, I’m right.

If I predict rain because I saw a black cat walk under a ladder, and it rains, am I right (but for the wrong reasons) or am I just wrong?

Can one ever be right for the wrong reasons?

Gettier problems! One of my favorite class of epistemological failures (along with the free pass given to moral luck, and the tolerance of “little follies”, i.e. seemingly innocuous superstitious beliefs)

Gettier problems! One of my favorite class of epistemological failures (along with the free pass given to moral luck, and the tolerance of “little follies”, i.e. seemingly innocuous superstitious beliefs)

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PhD in aviation ∩ climate science | Aviator, diver, Etherean, nexialist | Host of /diving /ethfinance /eth-staker /geopolitics /science /singapore /thomas

Indeed! I mentioned moral luck without being aware of “resulting”, but it sounds adjacent if not similar.

Speed on your way home, and if nothing happens, society might view you as just being another bad driver. Maybe you’ll get a stern talking to or a ticket if you get caught.

Speed on your way home and run over a kid, and you’ll be a despised criminal for the rest of your life. You’ll likely see the inside of a prison cell.

In both scenarios, the initial decision to speed was the same. The outcome was only dictated by chance. Yet we treat the perpetrators differently

Gettier problems pair nicely with Annie Duke's "resulting", which is when a decision gets judged as good or bad based on the results

Resulting makes it much harder to know what's good advice in modern domains. When you have millions of entrepreneurs & investors making path-dependent bets, hard to tell whose success was the result of chance