āIām not sure why we should expect the group to be well-calibrated when no individual is?āāSomething something marketplace of ideas? An analogy is a court, where the prosecution and the defence both have their conclusions assigned to them beforehand. They are both epistemically vicious, in opposite ways. Then the idea is that the best arguments win on their merits. Iām not sure quite how this analogy would fit though (Iāve had false starts writing a blog post on this a few times).
āI certainly donāt endorse doing nothingā Yep I get that this argument is only one consideration, but my point extends to ātrying less hardā as well I think.
āYep I get that this argument is only one consideration, but my point extends to ātrying less hardā as well I think.ā Iām not sure I understand what you mean, could you explain it more?
āSomething something marketplace of ideas?ā Yeah, this is an empirical questionātheoretically, we might see better arguments rise in status and influence people more, and of course to some extent we do (e.g. AI risk rising in status over the last 10 years). But there are other factors influencing the status of ideas too, like some kind of general action-bias /ā power-seeking-bias. Concretely, I feel that most of the bullet points in the āuncertaintyā section of the post are underrepresented in the discourseācurious if you disagree.
Also, one more point on the deferral thingāone way in which I think Iām weird is that I would genuinely raise my esteem of someone (on a gut-level) if they said āIām hopelessly biased on this topic, I canāt think about it, donāt listen to meā. Unfortunately, you never see this. I would really like to see that more. E.g. if someone who tries extremely hard said āI canāt really clearly think about what Iām doing because Iām working so hard, so be careful about listening to meā it would be very beautiful to me. Poetically speaking, it would beā¦ accepting that they are a human weapon, forged for a purpose, impaired by that sacrifice, baring it for the world to see. There would be a slight feeling of heartbreak and love for them in me, and I might very well value them more than before. As I argue in the āEpistemic distortionā section, thereās at least to some extent a deep tradeoff between doing and thinkingāso admitting that they are trading off against thinking, crippling their mind on a deep level, could make people respect them more by showing how much they are sacrificing for the ādoingā status hierarchy. It could be heroic. Thatās just a fantasy I have about how things could work.
āIām not sure why we should expect the group to be well-calibrated when no individual is?āāSomething something marketplace of ideas? An analogy is a court, where the prosecution and the defence both have their conclusions assigned to them beforehand. They are both epistemically vicious, in opposite ways. Then the idea is that the best arguments win on their merits. Iām not sure quite how this analogy would fit though (Iāve had false starts writing a blog post on this a few times).
āI certainly donāt endorse doing nothingā Yep I get that this argument is only one consideration, but my point extends to ātrying less hardā as well I think.
āYep I get that this argument is only one consideration, but my point extends to ātrying less hardā as well I think.ā Iām not sure I understand what you mean, could you explain it more?
āSomething something marketplace of ideas?ā
Yeah, this is an empirical questionātheoretically, we might see better arguments rise in status and influence people more, and of course to some extent we do (e.g. AI risk rising in status over the last 10 years). But there are other factors influencing the status of ideas too, like some kind of general action-bias /ā power-seeking-bias. Concretely, I feel that most of the bullet points in the āuncertaintyā section of the post are underrepresented in the discourseācurious if you disagree.
Also, one more point on the deferral thingāone way in which I think Iām weird is that I would genuinely raise my esteem of someone (on a gut-level) if they said āIām hopelessly biased on this topic, I canāt think about it, donāt listen to meā. Unfortunately, you never see this. I would really like to see that more.
E.g. if someone who tries extremely hard said āI canāt really clearly think about what Iām doing because Iām working so hard, so be careful about listening to meā it would be very beautiful to me. Poetically speaking, it would beā¦ accepting that they are a human weapon, forged for a purpose, impaired by that sacrifice, baring it for the world to see. There would be a slight feeling of heartbreak and love for them in me, and I might very well value them more than before. As I argue in the āEpistemic distortionā section, thereās at least to some extent a deep tradeoff between doing and thinkingāso admitting that they are trading off against thinking, crippling their mind on a deep level, could make people respect them more by showing how much they are sacrificing for the ādoingā status hierarchy. It could be heroic.
Thatās just a fantasy I have about how things could work.