That said, I’m confused on why you believe this post is an example of “academic research we might be unaware of is important to an issue we care about.” If it were the case that the majority of political philosophers oppose High Stakes Instrumentalism, I think I would waiver little in my belief that EA billionaire philanthropy is justified and even laudable. For example, I would not suddenly believe that Gateses are wrong to prevent low-income children from dying instead of gifting it to the US federal government for reallocation, nor that Tuna and Moskovitz are wrong to want to reduce the risk of future pandemics and AGI catastrophes.
(This, to me, is akin to why I do not update strongly on there being slightly more deontologists in expert surveys of philosophers than consequentialists)
Given this, it directly follows that expert consensus should not be a strong update in favor of my preferred hypothesis, if my preferred hypothesis was not strongly motivated by expert deference to begin with.
It’s possible that I just have a lot less epistemic humility/expert deference in this domain than you do? But from reading your public writings and our occasional conversations, I do not believe that this is true in other domains, so I’d be interested in knowing what is different here.
I really appreciate this post too!
That said, I’m confused on why you believe this post is an example of “academic research we might be unaware of is important to an issue we care about.” If it were the case that the majority of political philosophers oppose High Stakes Instrumentalism, I think I would waiver little in my belief that EA billionaire philanthropy is justified and even laudable. For example, I would not suddenly believe that Gateses are wrong to prevent low-income children from dying instead of gifting it to the US federal government for reallocation, nor that Tuna and Moskovitz are wrong to want to reduce the risk of future pandemics and AGI catastrophes.
(This, to me, is akin to why I do not update strongly on there being slightly more deontologists in expert surveys of philosophers than consequentialists)
Given this, it directly follows that expert consensus should not be a strong update in favor of my preferred hypothesis, if my preferred hypothesis was not strongly motivated by expert deference to begin with.
It’s possible that I just have a lot less epistemic humility/expert deference in this domain than you do? But from reading your public writings and our occasional conversations, I do not believe that this is true in other domains, so I’d be interested in knowing what is different here.