[SEQ RERUN] "I don't know."

Eliezer missed the possibility that the tree had no apples, which is fairly likely.

This is exactly the kind of post that I'm at LW for. I am asked about 20-10,000 questions as day, the majority of which I have to answer "I don't know" for. (How anyone parented before google is beyond me.) Often I use "I don't know" as a replacement for "I don't have the confidence to answer your question adequately[1] in the 15 seconds that I have before you ask another question."

I understand that conversations with children might seem trivial to most here or that this post was never intended to be used in the context I've taken it. Also, it seems that "X" may be a non-rationalist and children usually are. (I think that its very possible that we are all born as rationalists.) So, although I may be beyond hope, my children are not. This post reminds me that along with answering questions I'm not only passing along what I know, I'm passing along my thinking process. I'm also directly transferring all my biases.

So what has come to me after reading this is that it's far better for me to vocalize the process I'm going thru to find an answer rather than to try to just come up with one. And that my knee-jerk reaction to thinking "I need to answer" is a bias in itself--probably the result of decades of schooling and testing.

1: Often explanations are simplified to the extent that they become misleading or just wrong. eg: any non-local news story or a history textbook.

I'm not sure that I agree with this.

"I don't know" is an effective way of communicating "I probably don't have any more information on the subject then you do". That itself is both a useful and a meaningful thing to communicate.

Or, to put it another way; if EY said to me "there are between 10 and 1000 apples on that tree", then I would use that assessment to update my Bayesian probability of how many apples are likely to be on the tree. However, if EY does not have any more information on the subject then I do, then updating my Bayesian probability based on his statement adds nothing but randomness to my answer.

Interestingly enough, Eliezer answers a number of questions during his Q&A just this way.

Hmm. I have ready opinions on everything, whether I know what the hell I'm talking about or not. I think this may be a bad thing, therefore have taken to trying to say "I don't know" when my reasons for my opinions (as best I can stacktrace them) don't pass personal muster. Is this bad?

"It's not that I don't know. I'm using an ignorance prior." I find this very silly.

One use for "I don't know" I've found is to signal a lack of confidence. If I say "I don't know, but it seems like," people will understand that I haven't moved far from an ignorance prior.

Another useful function is the implied contrast: I know far more than you about voting theory, but even then I don't know whether AV would be better, so you definitely shouldn't claim to know.

I think the key issue with "I don't know" (as with many other things) is that it should be a starting point rather than a stop sign. If you're using it as a starting point, the phrase indicates that you don't have enough relevant information to move forward but you would like to find out more. In everyday conversation, that means that you (or the person who asked you the question) are still in the information-gathering phase of the process, e.g. "I don't know; let me google it" or "I don't know; Rebecca might remember - have you asked her?" For rationalist-level problems, it means recognizing your ignorance (just as you should notice your confusion) rather than glossing over it or making up some plausible-sounding story that makes it seem like you understand what's going on. "I don't know" means that there's work to be done in figuring it out better, and it's worth taking a moment to see that you don't have a clear answer yet before you start guessing.

The problem is when you take "I don't know" to mean "it's not worth thinking about", or you turn it into a treasured mystery, or you conclude that you're allowed to believe whatever you want (no need to worry about what's true) because no one actually knows what's true. You don't know, and you're fine with keeping it that way.

Eliezer actually discusses this briefly in his 12 virtues essay, where he says (in the first paragraph of the essay) that curiosity requires both recognizing your ignorance and seeking to relinquish it.

I think what Eliezer is arguing against is "I don't know" being used to shield information that allows the speaker to privilege hypotheses that are obviously wrong if we had taken basic background knowledge into account. For example: "I don't know if there is a teapot floating around the asteroid belt." The teapot hypothesis is absurd if we base our priors on background knowledge, but the previous sentence makes it sound more plausible because it hides this information.