Re the new 2024 Rethink Cause Prio survey: “The EA community should defer to mainstream experts on most topics, rather than embrace contrarian views. [“Defer to experts”]” 3% strongly agree, 18% somewhat agree, 35% somewhat disagree, 15% strongly disagree.
This seems pretty bad to me, especially for a group that frames itself as recognizing intellectual humility/we (base rate for an intellectual movement) are so often wrong.
(Charitable interpretation) It’s also just the case that EAs tend to have lots of views that they’re being contrarian about because they’re trying to maximize the the expected value of information (often justified with something like: “usually contrarians are wrong, but if they are right, they are often more valuable for information than average person who just agrees”).
If this is the case, though, I fear that some of us are confusing the norm of being contrarian instrumental reasons and for “being correct” reasons.
I think the “most topics” thing is ambiguous. There are some topics on which mainstream experts tend to be correct and some on which they’re wrong, and although expertise is valuable on topics experts think about, they might be wrong on most topics central to EA. [1]
In the real world, assuming we have more than five minutes to think about a question, we shouldn’t “defer” to experts or immediately “embrace contrarian views”, rather use their expertise and reject it when appropriate. Since this wasn’t an option in the poll, my guess is many respondents just wrote how much they like being contrarian, and EAs have to often be contrarian on topics they think about so it came out in favor of contrarianism.
[1] Experts can be wrong because they don’t think in probabilities, they have a lack of imagination, there are obvious political incentives to say one thing over another, and probably other reasons, and lots of the central EA questions don’t have actual well-developed scientific fields around them, so many of the “experts” aren’t people who have thought about similar questions in a truth-seeking way for many years
Re the new 2024 Rethink Cause Prio survey: “The EA community should defer to mainstream experts on most topics, rather than embrace contrarian views. [“Defer to experts”]” 3% strongly agree, 18% somewhat agree, 35% somewhat disagree, 15% strongly disagree.
This seems pretty bad to me, especially for a group that frames itself as recognizing intellectual humility/we (base rate for an intellectual movement) are so often wrong.
(Charitable interpretation) It’s also just the case that EAs tend to have lots of views that they’re being contrarian about because they’re trying to maximize the the expected value of information (often justified with something like: “usually contrarians are wrong, but if they are right, they are often more valuable for information than average person who just agrees”).
If this is the case, though, I fear that some of us are confusing the norm of being contrarian instrumental reasons and for “being correct” reasons.
Tho lmk if you disagree.
I think the “most topics” thing is ambiguous. There are some topics on which mainstream experts tend to be correct and some on which they’re wrong, and although expertise is valuable on topics experts think about, they might be wrong on most topics central to EA. [1]
In the real world, assuming we have more than five minutes to think about a question, we shouldn’t “defer” to experts or immediately “embrace contrarian views”, rather use their expertise and reject it when appropriate. Since this wasn’t an option in the poll, my guess is many respondents just wrote how much they like being contrarian, and EAs have to often be contrarian on topics they think about so it came out in favor of contrarianism.
[1] Experts can be wrong because they don’t think in probabilities, they have a lack of imagination, there are obvious political incentives to say one thing over another, and probably other reasons, and lots of the central EA questions don’t have actual well-developed scientific fields around them, so many of the “experts” aren’t people who have thought about similar questions in a truth-seeking way for many years