I think this framing is wrong, because high standards of truth-seeking are not separable from social aspects of communication, or from ensuring the diversity of the community. The idea that they are separable is an illusion.
Somehow the rationalist ideas that humans have biases and should strive to contain them, have brought an opposite result—that individuals in the community believe that if they follow some style of thinking, and if they prioritise truth-seeking as a value, then that makes them bias-free. In reality, people have strong biases even when they know they have them. The way to make the collective more truth-seeking is to make it more diverse and add checks and balances that stop errors from propagating.
I guess you could say the divide is between people who think ‘epistemics’ is a thing that can be evaluated in itself, and those who think it’s strongly tied to other things.
I frequently feel there’s a subtext here that high decouplers are less biased (whether the bias is racial, confirmation, in-group, status-seeking, etc.). Sometimes it’s not even a subtext.
But I don’t know of any research showing that high decouplers are less biased in all the normal human ways. The only trait “high decoupler” describes is tending to decontextualize a statement. And context frequently has implications for social welfare, so it’s not at all clear that high decoupling is, on average, useful to EA goals—much less a substitute to group-level check on bias.
I say all this while considering myself a high decoupler!
I think this framing is wrong, because high standards of truth-seeking are not separable from social aspects of communication, or from ensuring the diversity of the community. The idea that they are separable is an illusion.
Somehow the rationalist ideas that humans have biases and should strive to contain them, have brought an opposite result—that individuals in the community believe that if they follow some style of thinking, and if they prioritise truth-seeking as a value, then that makes them bias-free. In reality, people have strong biases even when they know they have them. The way to make the collective more truth-seeking is to make it more diverse and add checks and balances that stop errors from propagating.
I guess you could say the divide is between people who think ‘epistemics’ is a thing that can be evaluated in itself, and those who think it’s strongly tied to other things.
I think this is a much needed corrective.
I frequently feel there’s a subtext here that high decouplers are less biased (whether the bias is racial, confirmation, in-group, status-seeking, etc.). Sometimes it’s not even a subtext.
But I don’t know of any research showing that high decouplers are less biased in all the normal human ways. The only trait “high decoupler” describes is tending to decontextualize a statement. And context frequently has implications for social welfare, so it’s not at all clear that high decoupling is, on average, useful to EA goals—much less a substitute to group-level check on bias.
I say all this while considering myself a high decoupler!