I don’t really want the discussion to focus entirely on the meta-level, but the conversation went something like “we can condition funding on the quality of the researcher’s past work ” → “I think it’s hard to separate judgements about research quality from disagreement with its conclusions, or even unrelated opinions on the authors.” → “more diversity in funders would help” (which was the original claim in the post!) → “I don’t think this solves the problem...more & better thinking about concrete approaches to dealing with this still seems preferable to throwing broad intuitions at each other.” So I pointed out that more diversity, which was the post’s suggestion, that I was referring back to, was as concrete a solution to the general issue of ” it’s hard to separate judgements about research quality from disagreement with its conclusions” as I can imagine. But I don’t think we’re using different definitions at all. At this point, it seems clear you wanted something more concrete (“have Openphil split it’s budget in the following way,”) but it wouldn’t have solved the general problem which was being discussed. Which was why I said I can’t imagine a more concrete solution to the problem you were discussing.
In any case, I’m much more interested in the object level discussion of what would help, or not, and why.
I don’t really want the discussion to focus entirely on the meta-level, but the conversation went something like “we can condition funding on the quality of the researcher’s past work ” → “I think it’s hard to separate judgements about research quality from disagreement with its conclusions, or even unrelated opinions on the authors.” → “more diversity in funders would help” (which was the original claim in the post!) → “I don’t think this solves the problem...more & better thinking about concrete approaches to dealing with this still seems preferable to throwing broad intuitions at each other.” So I pointed out that more diversity, which was the post’s suggestion, that I was referring back to, was as concrete a solution to the general issue of ” it’s hard to separate judgements about research quality from disagreement with its conclusions” as I can imagine. But I don’t think we’re using different definitions at all. At this point, it seems clear you wanted something more concrete (“have Openphil split it’s budget in the following way,”) but it wouldn’t have solved the general problem which was being discussed. Which was why I said I can’t imagine a more concrete solution to the problem you were discussing.
In any case, I’m much more interested in the object level discussion of what would help, or not, and why.