I like this comment! But I think I would actually go a step further:
I don’t dispute the expertise of the people you listed.
I haven’t thought too hard about this, but I think I do actually dispute the expertise of the people Ryan listed. But that is nothing personal about them!
When I think of the term ‘expert’ I usually have people in mind who are building on decades of knowledge of a lot of different practitioners in their field. The field of global priorities has not existed long enough and has not developed enough depth to have meaningful expertise as I think of the term.
I am very happy to defer to experts if they have orders of magnitude more knowledge than me in a field. I will gladly accept the help of an electrician for any complex electrical problem despite the fact that I changed a light switch that one time.
But I don’t think that applies to global priorities for people who are already heavily involved in the EA community—the gap between these EAs and the global priorities ‘experts’ listed in terms of knowledge about global priorities is much, much smaller than between me and electrician about electrics. So it’s much less obvious whether it makes sense for these people to defer.
The dynamic you describe is a big part of why I think we should defer to people like Peter Singer even if he doesn’t work on cause prioritization full time. I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that he’s read stuff like Superintelligence, The Precipice, etc. (and probably discussed the ideas with the authors) and just doesn’t find their arguments as compelling as Ryan.
I like this comment! But I think I would actually go a step further:
I haven’t thought too hard about this, but I think I do actually dispute the expertise of the people Ryan listed. But that is nothing personal about them!
When I think of the term ‘expert’ I usually have people in mind who are building on decades of knowledge of a lot of different practitioners in their field. The field of global priorities has not existed long enough and has not developed enough depth to have meaningful expertise as I think of the term.
I am very happy to defer to experts if they have orders of magnitude more knowledge than me in a field. I will gladly accept the help of an electrician for any complex electrical problem despite the fact that I changed a light switch that one time.
But I don’t think that applies to global priorities for people who are already heavily involved in the EA community—the gap between these EAs and the global priorities ‘experts’ listed in terms of knowledge about global priorities is much, much smaller than between me and electrician about electrics. So it’s much less obvious whether it makes sense for these people to defer.
This is a really insightful comment.
The dynamic you describe is a big part of why I think we should defer to people like Peter Singer even if he doesn’t work on cause prioritization full time. I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that he’s read stuff like Superintelligence, The Precipice, etc. (and probably discussed the ideas with the authors) and just doesn’t find their arguments as compelling as Ryan.