New Thread On Sklansky Extrapolation Question

[David Sklansky]

There were too many side issues discussed on the other thread. Here is a clearer restatement of the question.

Say people are carefully evaluated and are classified by how likely they are to get things right on yes or no questions. They are rated from A to G. A's are historically the most likely to get things right. But even they are far from perfect.

A specific question comes up- "Is Y true?"

The general consensus is that it is not. 70% of A's think it is not.

The thing is that 100% of G's think Y isn't true. Same with 95% of F's, 90% of E's, 85% of D's, 80% of C's and 75% of B's.

There is a clear pattern. And it is heading toward a conclusion that if there were people substantially better than A's at getting answers (call them Omegas), most of them would in fact believe that Y IS true.

The question is whether it is reasonable, given no other information, to think the pattern will continue and that it would be a good bet to put your money on Y's truth. Or should we assume the pattern probably WON'T continue. Meaning that most omegas, if they existed, would agree with the majority of the A's (and everyone else).

Here is another way of looking at it. Without knowledge of the survey, seventy percent of A's think not only that Y is true but also that most omegas also think that y is true.
Should they change their mind when apprised of the survey and the pattern it seems to show? Remember that the survey will tell them that 70% of the smartest people agree with them.

In order to be persuaded to change their minds an A who is one of the 70% to believe Y, must somehow think changing is right, though 70% of the smartest agree with him, soley because even MORE than 70% of the less smart agree with him. Could that make sense? Yet if he sticks to his guns, he is defying a pattern when there is no good reason to think it wouldn't continue. (To make the impact clearer, one might imagine that the known pattern ends with 55% rather than 70% of the smartest people disagreeing with Y. Now only a small extrapolation has smarter people yet, agreeing with Y.)