The book Noise by Daniel Kahneman et al sometimes uses the terms statistical thinking and causal thinking as substitutes for outside and inside views.

These terms seem better at reminding me what the categories are meant to be, and why evolution prepared us less for one of them. But they still leave some confusion about how to draw the boundary between the concepts.

Eliezer also wrote an interesting comment [EA(p) · GW(p)] on the EA Forum crosspost of this article, copying it here for convenience:

I worriedly predict that anyone who followed your advice here would just switch to describing whatever they're doing as "reference class forecasting" since this captures the key dynamic that makes describing what they're doing as "outside viewing" appealing: namely, they get to pick a choice of "reference class" whose samples yield the answer they want, claim that their point is in the reference class, and then claiming that what they're doing is what superforecasters do and what Philip Tetlock told them to do and super epistemically virtuous and anyone who argues with them gets all the burden of proof and is probably a bad person but we get to virtuously listen to them and then reject them for having used the "inside view".

My own take:  Rule One of invoking "the outside view" or "reference class forecasting" is that if a point is more dissimilar to examples in your choice of "reference class" than the examples in the "reference class" are dissimilar to each other, what you're doing is "analogy", not "outside viewing".

All those experimental results on people doing well by using the outside view are results on people drawing a new sample from the same bag as previous samples.  Not "arguably the same bag" or "well it's the same bag if you look at this way", really actually the same bag: how late you'll be getting Christmas presents this year, based on how late you were in previous years.  Superforecasters doing well by extrapolating are extrapolating a time-series over 20 years, which was a straight line over those 20 years, to another 5 years out along the same line with the same error bars, and then using that as the baseline for further adjustments with due epistemic humility about how sometimes straight lines just get interrupted some year.  Not by them picking a class of 5 "relevant" historical events that all had the same outcome, and arguing that some 6th historical event goes in the same class and will have that same outcome.

This post was easy to read. Far easier than a post like this usually manages to be. And It was definitely useful. I realized i have been messing up in some ways described in the post.

I really liked this post, thanks so much for writing it. I have been very frustrated by people conflating these different meanings of "outside view" in the past.

This is a negative review of an admittedly highly-rated post.

The positives first; I think this post is highly reasonable and well written. I'm glad that it exists and think it contributes to the intellectual conversation in rationality. The examples help the reader reason better, and it contains many pieces of advice that I endorse.

But overall, 1) I ultimately disagree with its main point, and 2) it's way too strong/absolutist about it.

Throughout my life of attempting to have true beliefs and take effective actions, I have quite strongly learned some distinction that maps onto the ideas of inside and outside view. I find this distinction extremely helpful, and specifically, remembering to use (what I call) the outside view often wins me a lot of Bayes points.

When I read through the Big Lists O' Things, I have these responses;

• I think many of those things are simply valid uses of the terms^[1]
• People using a term wrong isn't a great reason^[2] to taboo that term; e.g. there are countless mis-uses of the concept of "truth" or "entropy" or "capitalism", but the concepts still carve reality
• Seems like maybe some of these you heard one person use once, and then it got to go on the list?

A key example of the absolutism comes from the intro: "I recommend we permanently taboo [? · GW] “Outside view,” i.e. stop using the word and use more precise, less confused concepts instead." (emphasis added).

But, as described in the original linked sequence post, the purpose of tabooing a word is to remember why you formed a concept in the first place, and see if that break-down helps you reason further. The point is not to stop using a word.

I think the absolutism has caused this post to have negative effects; the phrase "taboo the outside view" has stuck around as a meme, and in my memory, when people use it it has not tended to be good for the conversation.

Instead, I think the post should have said the following.

• The term "outside view" can mean many things that can be importantly different (and sometimes wrong)
• When you reach for this term, take a second to consider more specifically what you mean, and considering saying that more specific thing instead
• When you hear someone say "outside view", consider asking them more specifically what they mean

(And to be clear, I'm against the absolutism here because I think it is incorrect, not because e.g. rationalists should generally be more polite and hedged, or anything like that.)

1. ^{^}

   I don't think it makes sense to use "outside view" as a synonym for "reference class forecasting". The joint that it carves in reality is bigger than that. And I think it's okay if terms move away from their initial historical use.

2. ^{^}

   To be fair I do actually consider it Bayesian evidence that we should taboo terms; the point of language is to communicate, and if a term is sufficiently mis-used, then it is a net-negative for communication.

I really like this post, it feels like it draws attention to an important lack of clarity.

One thing I'd suggest changing: when introducing new terminology, I think it's much better to use terms that are already widely comprehensible if possible, than terms based on specific references which you'd need to explain to people who are unfamiliar in each case.

So I'd suggest renaming 'ass-number' to wild guess and 'foxy aggregation' to multiple models or similar.

Good post. I myself have gotten into the habit of referring to an outside view instead of the outside view.

It should be mentioned that Eliezer's last (known) big release Inadequate Equilibria was pretty much a correction of pathological outside-viewing. The thrust can be summed up as "sometimes you can't beat the market, sometimes you can, it's important to know which situation you're in instead of just pathetically assuming the former all of the time."

Fwiw I'm not aware of using or understanding 'outside view' to mean something other than basically reference class forecasting (or trend extrapolation, which I'd say is the same). In your initial example, it seems like the other person is using it fine - yes, if you had more examples of an AGI takeoff, you could do better reference class forecasting, but their point is that in the absence of any examples of the specific thing, you also lack other non-reference-class-forecasting methods (e.g. a model), and you lack them even more than you lack relevant reference classes. They might be wrong, but it seems like a valid use. I assume you're right that some people do use the term for other stuff, because they say so in the comments, but is it actually that common?

I don't follow your critique of doing an intuitively-weighted average of outside view and some inside view. In particular, you say 'This is not Tetlock’s advice, nor is it the lesson from the forecasting tournaments...'. But in the  blog post section that you point to, you say 'Tetlock’s advice is to start with the outside view, and then adjust using the inside view.', which sounds like he is endorsing something very similar, or a superset of the thing you're citing him as disagreeing with?

Curated. The overall point about jargon-creep/confusion/misuse of Outside/Inside Views seems important. The specific suggestion of specificity seems potentially valuable, but I've appreciated some of the comments giving pushback or alternate takes on what to do about it. I'm hoping this curation prompts some further discussion of how to approach this.

Great post. That Anakin meme is gold.

“Whenever you notice yourself saying ‘outside view’ or ‘inside view,’ imagine a tiny Daniel Kokotajlo hopping up and down on your shoulder chirping ‘Taboo outside view.’”

Somehow I know this will now happen automatically whenever I hear or read “outside view.” 😂

I'm not sure what's your goal for engaging on this site. You don't like the content, most of your comments seem irrelevant to what they comment on, and you are not getting any engagement from other people, and no one is changing their minds because of your comments. So what are you trying to do? If you're interested in discussion or in changing minds, you should make comments that are more relevant and compelling, otherwise it seems you're just wasting your time and cluttering the discussion.

1. This post is worthwhile and correct, with clear downstream impact.  It might be the only non-AI post of 2021 that I've heard cited in in-person conversation -- and the cite immediately improved the discussion.
2. It's clearly written and laid out; unless you're already an excellent technical writer, you can probably learn something by ignoring its content and studying its structure.

Love this post! So linear and so many examples made it so easy to read! Also I was vaguely annoyed at the term Outside View but didn’t know why or whether I was right or anything? This expansion of it into parts makes a lot of sense.

I liked this post when I read it. It matched my sense that (e.g.) using "outside view" to refer to Hanson's phase transition model of agriculture->industry->AI was overstating the strength of the reasoning behind it.

But I've found that I've continued to use the terms "inside view" and "outside view" to refer to the broad categories sketched out in the two Big Lists O' Things. Both in my head and when speaking. (Or I'll use variants like "outside viewish" or similar.)

I think there is a meaningful distinction here: the reasoning moves on the "Outside" list involve looking at patterns, getting a sense of the general shape of things, thinking evidentially; the reasoning moves on the "Inside" list involve looking at mechanisms, relying on very specific claims/pictures of how things work, thinking causally. "Outside" and "Inside" actually seem like pretty apt labels for this distinction. And tracking this distinction can be helpful for keeping track of what an argument is and isn't trying to do.

For me, the distinction doesn't carry the implication that one is good and the other is not, or that the "outside" category is Backed By Science, or that an outside-style line of thinking represents the one Outside View on a question, or that categorizing an argument as inside or outside is all that precise a characterization of what it's based on.

Earlier proposal for more precise terminology: Gears Level & Policy Level [? · GW] by Abram Demski.

I'm not sure if outside (ha!) the "rationalist sphere", other people have independently invented the phrase "outside view" or not but I feel there's some spillover of the term "outside view" with similarity to "outsiders' view" which I think is common enough in layperson speak.

An outsider's view (or third party view, attempt to be objective and look "outside" your current situation as an "other") as conceived of in daily life does have elements that are pointed at in this post for popular interpretations of outside view ("Bias correction, in others or in oneself", "Deference to wisdom of the many"). 

But it also could heavily involve the original meaning described and clarified in this post too of "Reference class forecasting" if outsiders can offer broader views by adding to the reference class. 

For example in an argument when two people are fighting over (thing) say a married couple bickering or two friends whose relations have soured due to some problem, the two parties with vested interests may think their struggle is unique and particular, but a neutral third party or outsider can often (though not necessarily) have a better, objective view because they've also seen enough different fights over (thing) that the two involved have not seen before. 

Bravo, this is on the meta level a great example of applying epistemic rationality to replace a vague concept with better concepts. The post uses specific examples everywhere to be clearly understandable and easy to apply. It could be part of my specificity sequence, with a title like “The Power to Clarify Concepts”. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XosKB3mkvmXMZ3fBQ/specificity-your-brain-s-superpower [LW · GW]

This is great. Feels like a very good catch. Attempting to start a comment thread doing a post-mortem of why this happened and what measures might make this sort of clarity-losing definition drift happen less in the future.

One thing I am a bit surprised by is that the definition on the tag page for inside/outside view [? · GW] was very clearly the original definition, and included a link to the Wikipedia for reference class forecasting in the second sentence. This suggests that the drifted definition was probably not held as an explicit belief by a large number of highly involved LessWrongers. This in turn makes two different mechanisms seem most plausible to me:

1. Maybe there was sort of a doublethink thing going on among experienced LW folks that made everyone use "outside view" differently in practice than how they explicitly would have defined it if asked. This would probably be mostly driven by status dynamics, and attempts to solve would just be a special case of trying to find ways to not create applause lights [LW · GW].
2. Maybe the mistake was mainly among relatively new/inexperienced LW folks who tried to infer the definition from context rather than checking the tag page. In that case, attempts to solve would mostly look like increasing the legibility of discourse within LW to new/inexperienced readers, possibly by making the tag definition pages more clickable or just decreasing the proliferation of jargon.

The way I understand it is that 'outside view' is relative, and basically means 'relying on more reference class forecasting / less gears-level modelling than whatever the current topic of discussion is relying on'. So if we're discussing a gears-level model of how a computer chip works in the context of if we'll ever get a 10 OOM improvement in computing power, bringing up moore's law and general trends would be using an 'outside view'.

If we're talking about very broad trend extrapolation, then the inside view is already not very gears-level. So suppose someone says GWP is improving hyperbolically so we'll hit a singularity in the next century. An outside view correction to that would be 'well for x and y reasons we're very unlikely a priori to be living at the hinge of history so we should lower our credence in that trend extrapolation'. 

So someone bringing up broad priors or the anti-weirdness heruistic if we're talking about extrapolating trends would be moving to a 'more outside' view. Someone bringing up a trend when we're talking about a specific model would be using an 'outside view'. In each case, you're sort of zooming out to rely on a wider selection of (potentially less relevant) evidence than you were before.

Note that what I'm trying to do here isn't to counter your claim that the term isn't useful anymore but just to try and see what meaning the broad sense of the term might have, and this is the best I've come up with. Since what you mean by outside view shifts dependent on context, it's probably best to use the specific thing that you mean by it in each context, but there is still a unifying theme among the different ideas.

Reference class forecasting is k way regression, right.

One issue is that recent events - the pandemic, cryptocurrency - seem to just be "off the graph" events. You can try to use the "Spanish flu" as a predictor for the pandemic but it was so far away in time and world structure as to be useless. Cryptocurrency can be compared to the Tulip mania and other bubbles but again it's not the same.

We can't predict something then with this method if we don't have references.

Well, sorta. For my entire lifespan the science press is full of breathless optimism. A professor somewhere wrote a paper and got something to vaguely work. And thus flying cars and cyborgs or free energy is 5 minutes away!

Obviously nothing came out of any of that. The things that lead to progress had money - gigadollars - behind them. Like these white leds and the chip in the device I use to write this message and it's OLED screen and so on. And it took years and years and many generations of the tech past the breathless article stage - at least 20 years for OLED - to not suck.