but then he said “you don’t look for cancer doctors who’ve had cancer do you?”
Is this supposed to be some sort of knockdown argument? It obviously doesn’t drown out all other considerations, but I’d absolutely consider it a major pro if my oncologist was herself a cancer survivor.
Once I have conceded the basic point that no, standpoint doesn’t add infinite value such that nothing else matters, and you’ve conceded the basic point that yes, standpoint does add more than literally 0 value all else equal, then where does that leave us? We still need some recipe to weigh standpoint relative with expertise, study, and all the rest of the considerations.
I do agree that if I want to give a lot of weight to standpoint, I should be able to tell you a specific story about the added value I expect to get from it. E.g., my cancer-survivor oncologist will have a better understanding of what it is like to navigate the medical system from the patient’s perspective, which will make her more compassionate; she’ll be better able to advise me on intangible quality-of-life tradeoffs associated with different treatment decisions; etc.
But I worry that this heuristic could lead to a sort of Diversity Dunning–Kruger effect, where the same Standpoint X that would help a project succeed is also required in order to even identify that Standpoint X would be helpful to have. It’s kind of paradoxical to require that I have a specific story in advance about how filling in a blindspot will help me; if I knew that, then it wouldn’t be a blindspot.
It’s kind of paradoxical to require that I have a specific story in advance about how filling in a blindspot will help me; if I knew that, then it wouldn’t be a blindspot.
This is an excellent objection. Known unknown vs. unknown unknown sort of thing. Let me think about this a hot second.
Thanks for being patient. I decided that I think you can probably do something like a value of information calculation to figure out the opportunity cost of not exploring unknown unknowns multiplied by the probability that you’re missing something critical.
This is a good paragraph:
Once I have conceded the basic point that no, standpoint doesn’t add infinite value such that nothing else matters, and you’ve conceded the basic point that yes, standpoint does add more than literally 0 value all else equal, then where does that leave us? We still need some recipe to weigh standpoint relative with expertise, study, and all the rest of the considerations.
Moreover, what’s the principled line between standpoint in the sense of immutable demographic information (facts of birth) and standpoint in the sense of what someone chose to study, what they’ve cultivated downstream of their passions, etc.? Unclear to me.
But still, I’m guessing that intangible gains from demographic diversity improvement as motivated by the homophily objection would probably overlap with any well understood recipe.
Is this supposed to be some sort of knockdown argument? It obviously doesn’t drown out all other considerations, but I’d absolutely consider it a major pro if my oncologist was herself a cancer survivor.
Once I have conceded the basic point that no, standpoint doesn’t add infinite value such that nothing else matters, and you’ve conceded the basic point that yes, standpoint does add more than literally 0 value all else equal, then where does that leave us? We still need some recipe to weigh standpoint relative with expertise, study, and all the rest of the considerations.
I do agree that if I want to give a lot of weight to standpoint, I should be able to tell you a specific story about the added value I expect to get from it. E.g., my cancer-survivor oncologist will have a better understanding of what it is like to navigate the medical system from the patient’s perspective, which will make her more compassionate; she’ll be better able to advise me on intangible quality-of-life tradeoffs associated with different treatment decisions; etc.
But I worry that this heuristic could lead to a sort of Diversity Dunning–Kruger effect, where the same Standpoint X that would help a project succeed is also required in order to even identify that Standpoint X would be helpful to have. It’s kind of paradoxical to require that I have a specific story in advance about how filling in a blindspot will help me; if I knew that, then it wouldn’t be a blindspot.
This is an excellent objection. Known unknown vs. unknown unknown sort of thing. Let me think about this a hot second.
Thanks for being patient. I decided that I think you can probably do something like a value of information calculation to figure out the opportunity cost of not exploring unknown unknowns multiplied by the probability that you’re missing something critical.
This is a good paragraph:
Moreover, what’s the principled line between standpoint in the sense of immutable demographic information (facts of birth) and standpoint in the sense of what someone chose to study, what they’ve cultivated downstream of their passions, etc.? Unclear to me.
But still, I’m guessing that intangible gains from demographic diversity improvement as motivated by the homophily objection would probably overlap with any well understood recipe.