In response to
This is in response to a thoughtful post on Less Wrong titled "But somebody would have noticed". The author Alicorn raises a number of fictional scenarios where the argument "but somebody would have noticed" is seen to be mistaken.
A few words about shorthand arguments
"Somebody would have noticed" is shorthand for a certain argument. Like most shorthand arguments, it can be used well or badly. Using a shorthand argument badly is what we mean by a "fallacy".
A shorthand argument is used well, in my opinion, just if you could expand it to the longhand form and it would still work. That's not a requirement to always do the full expansion. You don't have to expand it each time, nor have 100% confidence of success, nor expand the whole thing if it's long or boring. But expanding it has to be a real option.
A list of salient critical questions
Critical questions that arise in expanding this particular argument:
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What constitutes noticing?
- Would other people who noticed understand what they saw?
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Further, would they understand it the same way that we do?
- How much potential is there for their understanding of the same phenomenon to be quite different from ours?
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Further, if their understanding is similar to ours, would they
express it in terms that we would recognize?
- This could include actions that we recognize as relating to the phenomenon.
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Would we know that they noticed?
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Motivations: Would people who noticed have strong motivations for
letting others know or for not letting others know?
- Would they want others to see that they noticed?
- Would they want others to see the phenomenon they noticed?
- Would they want to do something about it that someone could easily see?
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Ability:
- If they did want others to know, could they easily show it?
- Conversely, if they didn't, could they easily hide it?
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Who witnesses it:
- Would they want us in particular to see it (or not see it), as opposed to a select group? For instance, they might write a report about it that you and I probably wouldn't see.
- If they revealed it to others but not directly to us, what's the likelihood that the information would make its way to us?
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Motivations: Would people who noticed have strong motivations for
letting others know or for not letting others know?
-
The suppressed premise in that emthymeme is that "Nobody noticed".
Since we didn't ask everyone in the world, how did we determine
that?
- What is the population that would have noticed?
- What sample size did we take?
- How representative was our sampling?
- Assuming we have reasonable answers to the above, what level of confidence can we place on our sampling?
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