I agree mostly with the article, but I think truth-seeking should take into account the large fallibility of the movement. For example:
On the negative side: I can make an argument for any given inclusion or exclusion on the 80,000 hours job board, but I’m certain the overall gestalt is too normal. When I look at the list, almost every entry is the kind of things that any liberal cultivator parent would be happy to be asked about at a dinner party. Almost all of the remaining (and most of the liberal-cultivator-approved) jobs are very core EA. I don’t know what jobs in particular are missing but I do not believe high impact jobs have this much overlap with liberal cultivator parent values.
I don’t see the problem with this. Ideas like “we should stop poor people dying of preventable illnesses” are robust ideas that have stood the test of time and scrutiny, and the reason most people are on board with them is because they are correct and have significant evidence backing them up.
Conversely, “weirder” ideas have significantly less evidence backing them up, and are often based on shaky assumptions or controversial moral opinions. The most likely explanation for a weird new idea not being popular is that it’s wrong.
If you score “truth-seeking” by being correct on average about the most things, then a strategy of “agree with the majority of subject level scientific experts in every single field” is extremely hard to beat. I guess the hope is by encouraging contrarianism, you can find a hidden gem that pays off for everything else, but there is a cost to that.
If you score “truth-seeking” by being correct on average about the most things, then a strategy of “agree with the majority of subject level scientific experts in every single field” is extremely hard to beat. I guess the hope is by encouraging contrarianism, you can find a hidden gem that pays off for everything else, but there is a cost to that.
There is no scientific field dedicated to figuring out how to help people best. I agree that deferring to a global expert consensus on claims that thousands of people do indeed study and dedicate their life to is often a good idea, but I don’t think there exists any such reference class for the question of what jobs should show up on the 80k job board.
I think there are (at least) two reasons popular ideas might be, on average, less wrong than unpopular ones. One possibility is that, while popular opinion isn’t great at coming to correct conclusions, it has at least some modicum of correlation with correctness. The second is that popular ideas benefit from a selection effect of having many eyeballs on the idea (especially over a period of time). One would hope that the scrutiny would dethrone at least somepopular ideas that are wrong, while the universe of weird ideas has received very little scrutiny.
“Popular being more likely to be true” is only a good heuristic under certain circumstances where there is some epistemically reliable group expertise and you are not familiar with their arguments.
Modesty epistemology if taken to extreme is self defeating, for example majority of Earth’s population is still theist, without the memetic immune system radical modesty epistemology can lead to people executing stupid popular believed ideas to their stupid logical conclusion. I also take issue with this idea along the lines of “what if Einstein never tried to challenge Newtonian mechanics because from the outside view it is more likely he is wrong given the amount of times crackpots have failed to move the rachet of science forward” . I also personally psychologically cannot function within the framework of “what if I am a crackpot against the general consensus”, after certain amount of hours spent studying the material I think one should be able to suggest potentially true new ideas.
I agree mostly with the article, but I think truth-seeking should take into account the large fallibility of the movement. For example:
I don’t see the problem with this. Ideas like “we should stop poor people dying of preventable illnesses” are robust ideas that have stood the test of time and scrutiny, and the reason most people are on board with them is because they are correct and have significant evidence backing them up.
Conversely, “weirder” ideas have significantly less evidence backing them up, and are often based on shaky assumptions or controversial moral opinions. The most likely explanation for a weird new idea not being popular is that it’s wrong.
If you score “truth-seeking” by being correct on average about the most things, then a strategy of “agree with the majority of subject level scientific experts in every single field” is extremely hard to beat. I guess the hope is by encouraging contrarianism, you can find a hidden gem that pays off for everything else, but there is a cost to that.
There is no scientific field dedicated to figuring out how to help people best. I agree that deferring to a global expert consensus on claims that thousands of people do indeed study and dedicate their life to is often a good idea, but I don’t think there exists any such reference class for the question of what jobs should show up on the 80k job board.
“The most likely explanation for a weird new idea not being popular is that it’s wrong. ”
I agree with much of the rest of the comment, but this seems wrong—it seems more likely that these things just aren’t very correlated.
I think there are (at least) two reasons popular ideas might be, on average, less wrong than unpopular ones. One possibility is that, while popular opinion isn’t great at coming to correct conclusions, it has at least some modicum of correlation with correctness. The second is that popular ideas benefit from a selection effect of having many eyeballs on the idea (especially over a period of time). One would hope that the scrutiny would dethrone at least some popular ideas that are wrong, while the universe of weird ideas has received very little scrutiny.
“Popular being more likely to be true” is only a good heuristic under certain circumstances where there is some epistemically reliable group expertise and you are not familiar with their arguments.
Modesty epistemology if taken to extreme is self defeating, for example majority of Earth’s population is still theist, without the memetic immune system radical modesty epistemology can lead to people executing stupid popular believed ideas to their stupid logical conclusion. I also take issue with this idea along the lines of “what if Einstein never tried to challenge Newtonian mechanics because from the outside view it is more likely he is wrong given the amount of times crackpots have failed to move the rachet of science forward” . I also personally psychologically cannot function within the framework of “what if I am a crackpot against the general consensus”, after certain amount of hours spent studying the material I think one should be able to suggest potentially true new ideas.
‘New’ is probably a lot of the reason