I agree that people should be doing a better job here. As you say, you can just explain what you’re doing and articulate your confidence in specific claims.
The thing you want to track is confidence*importance. MacAskill and Ball do worse than Piper here. Both of them were making fundamental claims about their primary projects/areas of expertise, and all claims in those two areas are somewhat low confidence and people adjust their expectations that.
MacAskill and Ball both have defenses too. In MackAskill’s case, he’s got a big body of other work that makes it fairly clear DGB was not a comprehensive account of his all-things-considered views. It’d be nice to clear up the confusion by stating how he resolves the tension between different works of his, but the audience can also read them and resolve the tension for themselves. The specific content of William MacAskill’s brain is just not the thing that matters and its fine for him to act that way as long as he’s not being systematically misleading.
Ball looks worse, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he alluded to his true view somewhere public and he merely chose not to emphasize it so as to better navigate an insane political environment. If not, that’s bad, but again there’s a valid move of saying “here are some rationales for doing X” that doesn’t obligate you to disclose the ones you care most about, though this is risky business and a mild negative update on your trustworthiness.
I agree that people should be doing a better job here. As you say, you can just explain what you’re doing and articulate your confidence in specific claims.
The thing you want to track is confidence*importance. MacAskill and Ball do worse than Piper here. Both of them were making fundamental claims about their primary projects/areas of expertise, and all claims in those two areas are somewhat low confidence and people adjust their expectations that.
MacAskill and Ball both have defenses too. In MackAskill’s case, he’s got a big body of other work that makes it fairly clear DGB was not a comprehensive account of his all-things-considered views. It’d be nice to clear up the confusion by stating how he resolves the tension between different works of his, but the audience can also read them and resolve the tension for themselves. The specific content of William MacAskill’s brain is just not the thing that matters and its fine for him to act that way as long as he’s not being systematically misleading.
Ball looks worse, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he alluded to his true view somewhere public and he merely chose not to emphasize it so as to better navigate an insane political environment. If not, that’s bad, but again there’s a valid move of saying “here are some rationales for doing X” that doesn’t obligate you to disclose the ones you care most about, though this is risky business and a mild negative update on your trustworthiness.