I really like this post, especially as someone who is fairly anxious when writing for fear of being judged as ignorant. I definitely agree that we should promote an environment conducive for people to say wrong things.
However, I don’t fully agree with the notion of celebrating the self-confidence of people who “declare that think they can do more good than Peter Singer”. I’m quite likely misinterpreting what you mean by confidence as over-confidence, but just on the face value of it, I prefer claims to have an appropriate level of confidence associated with them. When someone makes a strong claim, I’d like to know whether the person is a domain expert with good epistemics who has done extensive research to arrive at the conclusion, or an innocent kid who claims to have discovered the most important thing in the world. Perhaps just stating epistemic status upfront would solve the problem. And perhaps over-confident people who are just about to take your advice to celebrate confidence and stop rewarding modesty should just reverse the advice.
On a tangential note, I sometimes find myself doing ‘defensive writing’ not just for defensive reasons, but also to try to convey what I mean to the reader as accurately as I can by ruling out everything else.
My take on self-confidence and innocence has several parts to it, and I think it’s one of the most important things I want to communicate, for many reasons I don’t go into here. But with self-confidence, you don’t need to be falsely sure that you’ll do more good than Peter Singer, but you can be very confident that trying is the right way to go. Confidence-in-path rather than confidence-in-results.
I know I’m following a trail that I know also goes to crazytown at some crossroad, and I see the skulls, but I’m pretty confident it’s the right way to go for me rn, so I’ll continue onwards at full speed until I learn that it’s not the right path.
At no point in your journey, no matter how uncertain you are, no matter how numerous be the options before you, will dragging your feet help you faster get to where you want to go.
Sometimes I call it “hubris”, but it’s not really about that. If you make a bet on that you’ll do more good than Peter Singer or whatever, you don’t need to be certain of the outcome to think it’s good EV. But to others who see you betting on it, they might mistake it for certainty—it’s as if they forgot that probabilities exist for a moment.
This is one of the most important reasons why hubris is so undervalued. People mistakenly think the goal is to generate precise probability estimates for frequently-discussed hypotheses (a goal in which deference can make sense). In a common-payoff-game research community, what matters is making new leaps in model space, not converging on probabilities. We (the research community) are bottlenecked by insight-production, not marginally better forecasts or decisions. Feign hubris if you need to, but strive to install it as a defense against model-dissolving deference.
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Oh, and it was nice to meet you in Berlin! Stay awesome. ^^
I really like this post, especially as someone who is fairly anxious when writing for fear of being judged as ignorant. I definitely agree that we should promote an environment conducive for people to say wrong things.
However, I don’t fully agree with the notion of celebrating the self-confidence of people who “declare that think they can do more good than Peter Singer”. I’m quite likely misinterpreting what you mean by confidence as over-confidence, but just on the face value of it, I prefer claims to have an appropriate level of confidence associated with them. When someone makes a strong claim, I’d like to know whether the person is a domain expert with good epistemics who has done extensive research to arrive at the conclusion, or an innocent kid who claims to have discovered the most important thing in the world. Perhaps just stating epistemic status upfront would solve the problem. And perhaps over-confident people who are just about to take your advice to celebrate confidence and stop rewarding modesty should just reverse the advice.
On a tangential note, I sometimes find myself doing ‘defensive writing’ not just for defensive reasons, but also to try to convey what I mean to the reader as accurately as I can by ruling out everything else.
My take on self-confidence and innocence has several parts to it, and I think it’s one of the most important things I want to communicate, for many reasons I don’t go into here. But with self-confidence, you don’t need to be falsely sure that you’ll do more good than Peter Singer, but you can be very confident that trying is the right way to go. Confidence-in-path rather than confidence-in-results.
I know I’m following a trail that I know also goes to crazytown at some crossroad, and I see the skulls, but I’m pretty confident it’s the right way to go for me rn, so I’ll continue onwards at full speed until I learn that it’s not the right path.
Sometimes I call it “hubris”, but it’s not really about that. If you make a bet on that you’ll do more good than Peter Singer or whatever, you don’t need to be certain of the outcome to think it’s good EV. But to others who see you betting on it, they might mistake it for certainty—it’s as if they forgot that probabilities exist for a moment.
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Oh, and it was nice to meet you in Berlin! Stay awesome. ^^
Nicely said.
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See you at GatherTown soon!