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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

> A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

Identifying yourself as simply a conservative or an anti-conservative in any context as a rule, without regard for circumstance, is just absurd to me. It's like identifying as someone who walks northward or southward. Or someone who prefers large numbers or small. There is no useful across-the-board argument that can be made for either changing things or not changing things.

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They explained in the article how their decision-making still depends on circumstance, so it's not a rule so much as a bias.

A properly calibrated bias will minimize error when you don't have any further information. This is like assuming the probability of rain is low in Arizona. It does rain, but no rain is the way to bet if you don't know how to do better. A more sophisticated weather prediction algorithm should be compared with a simple one to see if it actually does better.

But you do need to think about whether false positives or false negatives are more harmful, and whether uncertainty can be decreased by gathering more information.

I agree with you. That said, my reading of the article is that they do identify themselves as conservatives within a context - that of medical care in the US in 2020. They make their argument on the basis of a utility function, which one can debate the merits of, but the whole arguemnt seems very contextualized.

By "context" I meant, in this case, a specific medical decision/direction of research/etc. An entire field isn't sufficient context to make a judgement call.

Identifying as a conservative does not imply that you operate the same across the board.

It’s more of an orientation. It’s saying, while you may support liberalism at different times, if you sample decisions at some arbitrarily large sample size, you will find a preponderance of decisions in favor of keeping the same rules at play that your grandfather had.

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