Say Wrong Things
There are many ways you might approach being less wrong. A popular one is to make fewer wrong statements; to say fewer wrong things. Naively it would seem this is a recipe for success, since you just say more things that are true and right and fewer things that are false and wrong. But if Goodhart has anything to say about it, and he does, you'll find ways to maximize the measure at the expense of the original objective. Assuming the real objective is something like "have a more complete, precise, and accurate model of the world that better predicts the outcome of subjectively unknown events", then we can quickly see the many ways Goodharting can lead us astray if we focus too much on appearing less wrong. We might: * make fewer claims than we could, pulling us away from completeness even as we appear less wrong; * make weaker claims than we could, pulling us away from precision; * and, a perennial favorite, filter the claims we publicly make so we appear less wrong than we really are by hiding our least confident claims. The first two can be corrected with better calibration, that is by making statements with confidence intervals or likelihoods that proportionally match the observed frequency of correctness of similarly confident claims. But simply suggesting someone "be better calibrated" is not a motion they can make; it's an outcome of taking actions towards increasing calibration. As good a place to start as any for improving calibration is the forecasting literature, if that's what you'd like to do. The third is more tricky, though, because it's less directly about claims being made and their probability of correctness and more about social dynamics and how you appear to other people. And for that reason it's what I want to focus on here. Appearing Less Wrong I've met a lot of people in my life who are experts at not looking as stupid as they are. That's kind of harsh. Maybe a nicer way to say it is that they are experts at appearing to be better a