I appreciate the large effort put into this post! But I wanted to throw out one small part that made me distrust it as a whole. I’m a US PhD in cognitive science, and I think it’d be hard to find a top cognitive scientist in the country (e.g., say, who regularly gets large science grants from governmental science funding, gives keynote talks at top conferences, publishes in top journals, etc.) who takes Iain McGilchrist seriously as a scientist, at least in the “The Master & His Emissary” book. So citing him as an example of an expert whose findings are not being taken seriously makes me worry that you handpicked a person you like, without evaluating the science behind his claims (or without checking “expert consensus”). Which I think reflects the problems that arise when you start trying to be like “we need to weigh together different perspectives”. There’s no easy heuristics for differentiating good science/reasoning from pseudoscience, without incisive, personal inquiry—which is, as far as I’ve seen, what EA culture earnestly tries to do. (Like, do we give weight to the perspective of ESP people? If not, how do we differentiate them from the types of “domain experts” we should take seriously?)
I know this was only one small part of the post, and doesn’t necessarily reflect the other parts—but to avoid a kind of Gell-Mann Amnesia, I wanted to comment on the one part I could contribute to.
I think to some extent this is fair. This strikes me as a post put together by non-experts, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there are aspects of the post that is wrong. I think the approach I’ve taken is to have this is a list of possible criticisms, but probably that contains a number of issues. The idea is to steelman the important ones and reject the one’s we have reason to reject, rather than reject the whole. I think its fair to have more scepticism though, and I certainly would have liked a fuller bibliography, with experts on every area weighing in, but I suspect that the ‘ConcernedEAs’ probably didn’t have the capacity for this.
I agree with all that! I think my worry is that this one issue reflects the deep, general problem that it’s extremely hard to figure out what’s true, and relatively simple and commonly-suggested approaches like ‘read more people who have studied this issue’, ‘defer more to domain-experts’, ‘be more intellectually humble and incorporate a broader range of perspectives’ don’t actually solve this deep problem (all those approaches will lead you to cite people like McGilchrist).
Yes I think this is somewhat true, but I think that this is better than the status quo of EA at the moment.
One thing to do, which I am trying to do, is actually get more domain experts involved in things around EA, and talk to them more about how this stuff works, rather than deferring to anonymous ConcernedEAs or to a small group of very powerful EAs on this, but rather actually try and build a diverse epistemic community with many perspectives involved, which is what I interpret as the core claim of this manifesto
I appreciate the large effort put into this post! But I wanted to throw out one small part that made me distrust it as a whole. I’m a US PhD in cognitive science, and I think it’d be hard to find a top cognitive scientist in the country (e.g., say, who regularly gets large science grants from governmental science funding, gives keynote talks at top conferences, publishes in top journals, etc.) who takes Iain McGilchrist seriously as a scientist, at least in the “The Master & His Emissary” book. So citing him as an example of an expert whose findings are not being taken seriously makes me worry that you handpicked a person you like, without evaluating the science behind his claims (or without checking “expert consensus”). Which I think reflects the problems that arise when you start trying to be like “we need to weigh together different perspectives”. There’s no easy heuristics for differentiating good science/reasoning from pseudoscience, without incisive, personal inquiry—which is, as far as I’ve seen, what EA culture earnestly tries to do. (Like, do we give weight to the perspective of ESP people? If not, how do we differentiate them from the types of “domain experts” we should take seriously?)
I know this was only one small part of the post, and doesn’t necessarily reflect the other parts—but to avoid a kind of Gell-Mann Amnesia, I wanted to comment on the one part I could contribute to.
I think to some extent this is fair. This strikes me as a post put together by non-experts, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there are aspects of the post that is wrong. I think the approach I’ve taken is to have this is a list of possible criticisms, but probably that contains a number of issues. The idea is to steelman the important ones and reject the one’s we have reason to reject, rather than reject the whole. I think its fair to have more scepticism though, and I certainly would have liked a fuller bibliography, with experts on every area weighing in, but I suspect that the ‘ConcernedEAs’ probably didn’t have the capacity for this.
I agree with all that! I think my worry is that this one issue reflects the deep, general problem that it’s extremely hard to figure out what’s true, and relatively simple and commonly-suggested approaches like ‘read more people who have studied this issue’, ‘defer more to domain-experts’, ‘be more intellectually humble and incorporate a broader range of perspectives’ don’t actually solve this deep problem (all those approaches will lead you to cite people like McGilchrist).
Yes I think this is somewhat true, but I think that this is better than the status quo of EA at the moment.
One thing to do, which I am trying to do, is actually get more domain experts involved in things around EA, and talk to them more about how this stuff works, rather than deferring to anonymous ConcernedEAs or to a small group of very powerful EAs on this, but rather actually try and build a diverse epistemic community with many perspectives involved, which is what I interpret as the core claim of this manifesto