If Shogun counts as great now (to use his example), and it does so long as you think it is long enough to count, and they then come out with two more seasons that are mid, then Shogun Season 1 is still great because it did not depend on ‘paying off’ in future seasons. The Diplomat, to use another of his examples, is different, because it is building to and paying off things, so you take some damage if it can’t nail the ending. Then you have shows like Lost (whoops) or Severance, the ‘mystery box’ shows, where it really hurts. I can see Severance ending up
Indeed: the background probability of a sane leader launching an unprovoked trade war on the rest of the world is near zero. 10% would be unsettling, 30% would be (and was!) alarming.
30% was already a ridiculously high risk, and should have already been decisive if this was the deciding issue for a voter. You don't have to know that the bullet is in your chamber to decide not to play russian roulette.
I think this might have been intended more in the purple dragon sense than anything: focus on how they know exactly what experimental results they'll need to explain, and what that implies about their gut-level beliefs.
I teleport a hostage about to be executed to a capsule in lunar orbit. I then offer you three options: you pay me 1,000,000,000$, and I give him whatever pleasures are possible given the surroundings for a day, and then painlessly kill him; I simply kill him painlessly; I torture him for a day, and then painlessly kill him, and then pay you 1,000,000,000$.
Do you still take the money?
This strikes me as a pretty stark decision, such that I'd have a really hard time treating those who would take the money any different than I'd treat the babyeaters. It's almost exactly the same moral equation.
[...] Often I find that the best way to come up with new results is to find someone who's saying something that seems clearly, manifestly wrong to me, and then try to think of counterarguments. Wrong people provide a fertile source of research ideas.
Can you say anything more substantive than that? It's plausible given the studies mentioned in Cialdini, an example of which follows:
Freedman and Fraser didn't stop there. They tried a slightly different procedure on another sample of homeowners. These people first received a request to sign a petition that favored "keeping California beautiful." Of course, nearly everyone signed since state beauty, like efficiency in government or sound prenatal care, is one of those issues no one opposes. After waiting about two weeks, Freedman and Eraser se
I think you're leaving out another possibility: that they actually think they're right. This obviously doesn't apply to all cases, but I do think it's more common than you would think.
There's also a (related?) strong desire for consistency, which is explored in "Influence - Science and Practice" (Cialdini), which I found sheds some new light on the material in "How to win friends and influence people".
And this sums up why I feel that respect for the silly beliefs of others is important: it sets the stage for the acceptable treatment of things that are confusing or silly.
It's not that you take the belief seriously, but rather that you take seriously the epistemic position that makes that belief seem sensible.