Richard Y Chappell🔸 comments on Refusing to Quantify is Refusing to Think (about trade-offs)

[Richard Y Chappell🔸]

Thanks for the feedback! It’s probably helpful to read this in conjunction with ‘Good Judgment with Numbers’, because the latter post gives a fuller picture of my view whereas this one is specifically focused on why a certain kind of blind dismissal of numbers is messed up.

(A general issue I often find here is that when I’m explaining why a very specific bad objection is bad, many EAs instead want to (mis)read me as suggesting that nothing remotely in the vicinity of the targeted position could possibly be justified, and then complain that my argument doesn’t refute this—very different - ‘steelman’ position that they have in mind. But I’m not arguing against the position that we should sometimes be concerned about over-quantification for practical reasons. How could I? I agree with it! I’m arguing against the specific position specified in the post, i.e. holding that different kinds of values can’t—literally, can’t, like, in principle—be quantified.)

I think this is confusing two forms of ‘extreme’.

I’m actually trying to suggest that my interlocutor has confused these two things. There’s what’s conventional vs socially extreme, and there’s what’s epistemically extreme, and they aren’t the same thing. That’s my whole point in that paragraph. It isn’t necessarily epistemically safe to do what’s socially safe or conventional.