I prefer to just analyse and refute his concrete arguments on the object level.
I agree that work analyzing specific arguments is, overall, more useful than work analyzing individual people’s track records. Personally, partly for that reason, I’ve actually done a decent amount of public argument analysis (e.g. here, here, and most recently here) but never written a post like this before.
Still, I think, people do in practice tend to engage in epistemic deference. (I think that even people who don’t consciously practice epistemic deference tend to be influenced by the views of people they respect.) I also think that people should practice some level of epistemic deference, particularly if they’re new to an area. So—in that sense—I think this kind of track record analysis is still worth doing, even if it’s overall less useful than argument analysis.
(I hadn’t seen this reply when I made my other reply).
What do you think of legitimising behaviour that calls out the credibility of other community members in the future?
I am worried about displacing the concrete object level arguments as the sole domain of engagement. A culture in which arguments cannot be allowed to stand by themselves. In which people have to be concerned about prior credibility, track record and legitimacy when formulating their arguments...
Expert opinion has always been a substitute for object level arguments because of deference culture. Nobody has object level arguments for why x-risk in the 21st century is around 1/6: we just think it might be because Toby Ord says so and he is very credible. Is this ideal? No. But we do it because expert priors are the second best alternative when there is no data to base our judgments off of.
Given this, I think criticizing an expert’s priors is functionally an object level argument, since the expert’s prior is so often used as a substitute for object level analysis.
I agree that a slippery slope endpoint would be bad but I do not think criticizing expert priors takes us there.
I agree that work analyzing specific arguments is, overall, more useful than work analyzing individual people’s track records. Personally, partly for that reason, I’ve actually done a decent amount of public argument analysis (e.g. here, here, and most recently here) but never written a post like this before.
Still, I think, people do in practice tend to engage in epistemic deference. (I think that even people who don’t consciously practice epistemic deference tend to be influenced by the views of people they respect.) I also think that people should practice some level of epistemic deference, particularly if they’re new to an area. So—in that sense—I think this kind of track record analysis is still worth doing, even if it’s overall less useful than argument analysis.
(I hadn’t seen this reply when I made my other reply).
What do you think of legitimising behaviour that calls out the credibility of other community members in the future?
I am worried about displacing the concrete object level arguments as the sole domain of engagement. A culture in which arguments cannot be allowed to stand by themselves. In which people have to be concerned about prior credibility, track record and legitimacy when formulating their arguments...
It feels like a worse epistemic culture.
Expert opinion has always been a substitute for object level arguments because of deference culture. Nobody has object level arguments for why x-risk in the 21st century is around 1/6: we just think it might be because Toby Ord says so and he is very credible. Is this ideal? No. But we do it because expert priors are the second best alternative when there is no data to base our judgments off of.
Given this, I think criticizing an expert’s priors is functionally an object level argument, since the expert’s prior is so often used as a substitute for object level analysis.
I agree that a slippery slope endpoint would be bad but I do not think criticizing expert priors takes us there.