I disagreed with the Scott analogy but after thinking it through it made me change my mind. Simply make the following modification:
“Leading UN climatologists are in serious condition after all being wounded in the hurricane Smithfield that further killed as many people as were harmed by the FTX scandal. These climatologists claim that their models can predict the temperature of the Earth from now until 2200 - but they couldn’t even predict a hurricane in their own neighborhood. Why should we trust climatologists to protect us from some future catastrophe, when they can’t even protect themselves or those nearby in the present?”
Now we are talking about a group rather than one person and also what they missed is much more directly in their domain expertise. I.e. it feels, like the FTX Future fund team’s domain expertise on EA money, like something they shouldn’t be able to miss.
Would you say any rational person should downgrade their opinion of the climatology community and any output they have to offer and downgrade the trust they are getting their 2200 climate change models right?
I shared the modification with an EA that—like me—at first agreed with Cowen. Their response was something like “OK, so the climatologists not seeing the existential neartermist threat to themselves appears to still be a serious failure (people they know died!) on their part that needs to be addressed—but I agree it would be a mistake on my part to downgrade my confidence in their 2100 climate change model because if it”
However, we conceded that there is a catch: if the climatology community persistently finds their top UN climatologists wounded in hurricanes to the point that they can’t work on their models, then rationally we ought to update that their productive output should be lower than expected because they seem to have this neartermist blindspot to their own wellbeing and those nearby. This concession though comes with asterisks though. If we, for sake of argument, assume climatology research benefits greatly from climatologists getting close to hurricanes then we should expect climatologists, as a group, to see more hurricane wounds. In that case we should update, but not as strongly, if climatologists get hurricane wounds.
Ultimately I updated from agree with Cowen to disagree with Cowen after thinking this through. I’d be curious if and where you disagree with this.
I disagreed with the Scott analogy but after thinking it through it made me change my mind. Simply make the following modification:
“Leading UN climatologists are in serious condition after all being wounded in the hurricane Smithfield that further killed as many people as were harmed by the FTX scandal. These climatologists claim that their models can predict the temperature of the Earth from now until 2200 - but they couldn’t even predict a hurricane in their own neighborhood. Why should we trust climatologists to protect us from some future catastrophe, when they can’t even protect themselves or those nearby in the present?”
Now we are talking about a group rather than one person and also what they missed is much more directly in their domain expertise. I.e. it feels, like the FTX Future fund team’s domain expertise on EA money, like something they shouldn’t be able to miss.
Would you say any rational person should downgrade their opinion of the climatology community and any output they have to offer and downgrade the trust they are getting their 2200 climate change models right?
I shared the modification with an EA that—like me—at first agreed with Cowen. Their response was something like “OK, so the climatologists not seeing the existential neartermist threat to themselves appears to still be a serious failure (people they know died!) on their part that needs to be addressed—but I agree it would be a mistake on my part to downgrade my confidence in their 2100 climate change model because if it”
However, we conceded that there is a catch: if the climatology community persistently finds their top UN climatologists wounded in hurricanes to the point that they can’t work on their models, then rationally we ought to update that their productive output should be lower than expected because they seem to have this neartermist blindspot to their own wellbeing and those nearby. This concession though comes with asterisks though. If we, for sake of argument, assume climatology research benefits greatly from climatologists getting close to hurricanes then we should expect climatologists, as a group, to see more hurricane wounds. In that case we should update, but not as strongly, if climatologists get hurricane wounds.
Ultimately I updated from agree with Cowen to disagree with Cowen after thinking this through. I’d be curious if and where you disagree with this.