Taboo "Outside View"

Abstract

The term “Outside View”, as used in the Effective Altruism community, has expanded beyond its original meaning of reference class forecasting. The author argues that this expansion is harmful because it leads to confusion and conflation, making it difficult to discern the precise meaning and justification of the term. The author recommends that the term be tabood and replaced with more specific terms such as “reference class forecasting”, “analogy”, “trend extrapolation”, “foxy aggregation”, “bias correction”, “deference”, “anti-weirdness heuristic”, “priors”, “independent impression”, “it seems to me”, “subject matter expertise”, “models”, “wild guess”, and “intuition”. The author concludes that using these more specific terms will improve communication and encourage more careful reasoning, and that the practice of relying on a combination of “Outside View” and “Inside View” methods with intuition-based weighting is problematic. – AI-generated abstract