Executive summary: The author argues that many public intellectuals routinely communicate positions that differ from their true beliefs, not by lying but by selective disclosure, and that this practice is misleading, epistemically harmful, and should be replaced with explicit transparency about motivations, confidence, and speculative reasoning.
Key points:
The author claims that public intellectuals often present arguments optimized for audience reception or consensus rather than stating what actually motivates their beliefs, which foreseeably leads readers to false inferences.
Examples include Kelsey Piper’s early COVID writing, Will MacAskill’s framing of effective altruism in Doing Good Better, and Dean Ball’s public arguments for open-source AI that downplayed his core concerns about long-term power concentration.
The author emphasizes that endorsing only true statements is insufficient for epistemic honesty if omissions cause readers to misunderstand both the world and the author’s beliefs.
Because public intellectuals are domain experts relative to their audience, withholding genuine beliefs deprives readers of information they are not positioned to infer independently.
The author argues that excessive epistemic humility or deferral to consensus can be inappropriate when audiences rely on public intellectuals precisely for independent judgment.
As a remedy, the author proposes that public intellectuals explicitly label speculation, intuitions, confidence levels, and motivating reasons, rather than filtering them out, even at the cost of social or reputational risk.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, andcontact us if you have feedback.
Executive summary: The author argues that many public intellectuals routinely communicate positions that differ from their true beliefs, not by lying but by selective disclosure, and that this practice is misleading, epistemically harmful, and should be replaced with explicit transparency about motivations, confidence, and speculative reasoning.
Key points:
The author claims that public intellectuals often present arguments optimized for audience reception or consensus rather than stating what actually motivates their beliefs, which foreseeably leads readers to false inferences.
Examples include Kelsey Piper’s early COVID writing, Will MacAskill’s framing of effective altruism in Doing Good Better, and Dean Ball’s public arguments for open-source AI that downplayed his core concerns about long-term power concentration.
The author emphasizes that endorsing only true statements is insufficient for epistemic honesty if omissions cause readers to misunderstand both the world and the author’s beliefs.
Because public intellectuals are domain experts relative to their audience, withholding genuine beliefs deprives readers of information they are not positioned to infer independently.
The author argues that excessive epistemic humility or deferral to consensus can be inappropriate when audiences rely on public intellectuals precisely for independent judgment.
As a remedy, the author proposes that public intellectuals explicitly label speculation, intuitions, confidence levels, and motivating reasons, rather than filtering them out, even at the cost of social or reputational risk.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.