Quoting this paragraph and bolding the bit that I want to discuss:
Insofar as the GHD bucket is really motivated by something like sticking close to common sense, âneartermismâ turns out to be the wrong label for this. Neartermism may mandate prioritizing aggregate shrimp over poor people; common sense certainly does not. When the two come apart, we should give more weight to the possibility that (as-yet-unidentified) good principles support the common-sense worldview. So we should be especially cautious of completely dismissing commonsense priorities in a worldview-diversified portfolio (even as we give significant weight and support to a range of theoretically well-supported counterintuitive cause areas).
I think the intuition here is that sometimes we should trust the output of common sense, even if the process to get there seems wrong. In general this is a pretty good and often underappreciated heuristic, but I think thatâs really only because in many cases the output of common sense will have been subject to some kind of alternative pressure towards accuracy, as in the seemingly-excessive traditional process to prepare manioc that in fact destroyed cyanide in it, despite the people in question having no ability to test for cyanide. The lesson is that sometimes heuristics and practices succeed, and are selected for success, by processes unrelated to the explicit justfications given for them.
But there has to be some kind of connection between the idea being good and it being preserved in common sense. If bad ideas and good ideas are equally âmemetically fitâ, then common sense is no more likely to be true than any other hypothesis.
I think choices about how to give to charity are like this. The feedback mechanisms donât exist, either via obvious, conscious routes, nor any other route that I can think of. So I find it plausible that if the explicit argument for GHD fails, thereâs no other reason to privilege GHD in particular over other cause areas, no reason to expect an underlying unknown good principle to exist after all.
(Of course, just because I canât think of a route, doesnât mean there isnât one. But I think it merits skepticism.)
Quoting this paragraph and bolding the bit that I want to discuss:
I think the intuition here is that sometimes we should trust the output of common sense, even if the process to get there seems wrong. In general this is a pretty good and often underappreciated heuristic, but I think thatâs really only because in many cases the output of common sense will have been subject to some kind of alternative pressure towards accuracy, as in the seemingly-excessive traditional process to prepare manioc that in fact destroyed cyanide in it, despite the people in question having no ability to test for cyanide. The lesson is that sometimes heuristics and practices succeed, and are selected for success, by processes unrelated to the explicit justfications given for them.
But there has to be some kind of connection between the idea being good and it being preserved in common sense. If bad ideas and good ideas are equally âmemetically fitâ, then common sense is no more likely to be true than any other hypothesis.
I think choices about how to give to charity are like this. The feedback mechanisms donât exist, either via obvious, conscious routes, nor any other route that I can think of. So I find it plausible that if the explicit argument for GHD fails, thereâs no other reason to privilege GHD in particular over other cause areas, no reason to expect an underlying unknown good principle to exist after all.
(Of course, just because I canât think of a route, doesnât mean there isnât one. But I think it merits skepticism.)