A few considerations against, tied by generalism enables scale theme:
(1) There are a lot of domains where one can become an expert: it feels infeasible to train and select very capable forecasters in all of them. Being generally thoughtful person/forecaster allows to somewhat successfully go into areas outside your immediate expertise.
Training/selecting experts in a few especially important niches (e.g., AI, biosecurity, and certain topics in geopolitics) seems good and feasible.
(2) But at times of crisis, experts’ time is much more valuable than generalist’s time. Even now, it’s often the case that competent forecasters are quite busy with their main jobs — it’s not unlikely that competent forecaster-experts should be doing something different from forecasting.
I don’t think your argument reflects much on the importance of forecasting. E.g., it might be the case that forecasting is much more important than whatever experts are going (in absolute terms), but nonetheless, experts should do their things because no one else can substitute them. (To be clear, this is a hypothetical against the structure of the argument.)
I think it’s best to access the value of information you can get from forecasting directly.
Hopefully, we can make forecasts credible and communicate it to sympathetic experts on such teams.
A few considerations against, tied by generalism enables scale theme:
(1) There are a lot of domains where one can become an expert: it feels infeasible to train and select very capable forecasters in all of them. Being generally thoughtful person/forecaster allows to somewhat successfully go into areas outside your immediate expertise.
Training/selecting experts in a few especially important niches (e.g., AI, biosecurity, and certain topics in geopolitics) seems good and feasible.
(2) But at times of crisis, experts’ time is much more valuable than generalist’s time. Even now, it’s often the case that competent forecasters are quite busy with their main jobs — it’s not unlikely that competent forecaster-experts should be doing something different from forecasting.
For 2 how important do you think forecasting is if those best suited to it (assuming experts are) shouldn’t be spending their time on it?
For ID settings early outbreak forecasts can be critical and the decisions made are often informed by local + international expert teams.
I don’t think your argument reflects much on the importance of forecasting. E.g., it might be the case that forecasting is much more important than whatever experts are going (in absolute terms), but nonetheless, experts should do their things because no one else can substitute them. (To be clear, this is a hypothetical against the structure of the argument.)
I think it’s best to access the value of information you can get from forecasting directly.
Hopefully, we can make forecasts credible and communicate it to sympathetic experts on such teams.