Is this a response to what Gregory Lewis said? I donât think I understand.
Maybe this is subtle/âcomplicated⌠Are the examples youâre citing the actual consensus views of experts? Or are they examples of governments and institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO) misunderstanding what the expert conensus and/âor misrepresenting the expert consensus to the public?
This excerpt from the Nature article you cited makes it sound like the latter:
The change brings the WHOâs messaging in line with what a chorus of aerosol and public-health experts have been trying to get it to say since the earliest days of the outbreak. Many decry the agencyâs slowness in stating â unambiguously â that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne. Interviews conducted by Nature with dozens of specialists on disease transmission suggest that the WHOâs reluctance to accept and communicate evidence for airborne transmission was based on a series of problematic assumptions about how respiratory viruses spread.
Did random members of the EA community â as bright and eager as they might be â with no prior education, training, or experience with relevant fields like public health, epidemiology, virology, and medicine outsmart the majority of relevant experts on this question (airborne vs. not) or any others, not through sheer luck or chance, but by actually doing better research? This is a big claim, and if it is to be believed, it needs strong evidentiary support.
In this Nature article, there is an allegation that the WHO wasnât sufficiently epistemically modest or deferential to the appropriate class of experts:
Other criticisms are that the WHO relies on a narrow band of experts, many of whom havenât studied airborne transmission, and that it eschews a precautionary approach that could have protected countless people in the early stages of the pandemic.
And there is an allegation around communications, rather than around the science itself:
Having shifted its position incrementally over the past two years, the WHO also failed to adequately communicate its changing position, they say. As a result, it didnât emphasize early enough and clearly enough the importance of ventilation and indoor masking, key measures that can prevent airborne spread of the virus.
So, letâs say thereâs another pandemic. Which is the better strategy?
Strategy A: Read forum posts and blog posts by people in the EA community doing original research and opining on epidemiology, virology, and public health who have never so much cracked open a relevant textbook.
Strategy B: Survey sources of expert opinion, including publications like Nature, open letters written on behalf of expert communities, statements by academic and scientific organizations and so on, to determine if a particular institution like the WHO is accurately communicating the majority view of experts, or if theyâre a weird outlier adhering to a minority view, or just communicating the science badly.
I would say the Nature article is support for Strategy B and not at all support for Strategy A.
You could even interpret it as evidence against Strategy A. If you believe the criticism in Nature is right, even experts in an adjacent field or subfield, who have prestigious credentials like advising the WHO, can get things catastrophically wrong by being insufficiently epistemically modest and not deferring enough to the experts who know the most about a subject, and who have done the most research on it. If this is true, then that should make you even more skeptical about how reliable the research and recommendations will be from a non-expert blogger with no relevant education who only started learning about viruses and pandemics for the first time a few weeks ago.
What is described in the Nature piece sound like incredibly subtle mistakes (if we can for sure call them mistakes at this point). Lewisâ critique of the EA community is that it was making incredibly obvious, elementary mistakes. So, why think the EA community can outperform experts on avoiding subtle mistakes if it canât even avoid the obvious mistakes?
One of the recent examples of hubris I saw on the EA Forum was someone asserting that they (or the EA community at large) could resolve, within the next few months/âyears, the fundamental uncertainty around the philosophical assumptions that go into cost-effectiveness estimates comparing shrimp welfare and human welfare. Out of the topics I know well, the philosophy of consciousness might be #1, or at least near the top. I donât know how to convey the level of hubris that comment betrays.
It would be akin to saying that a few people in EA, with no training in physics, could figure out, in a few months or years, the correct theory of quantum gravity and reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics. Or that a few people in EA, with no training in biology or medicine, would be able to cure cancer within a few months or years. Or that, with no background in finance, business, or economics, that theyâd be able to launch an investment fund that consistently, sustainably achieves more alpha than the worldâs top-performing investment funds every year. Or that, with no background in engineering or science, theyâd be able to beat NASA and SpaceX in sending humans to Mars.
In other words, this is a level of hubris thatâs unfathomable, and just not a serious or credible way to look at the world or your own abilities, in the absence of strong, clear evidence that you possess even average abilities relative to the relevant expert class.
I donât know the first thing about epidemiology, virology, public health, or medicine. So, I canât independently evaluate how appropriate or correct it is/âwas for Gregory Lewis to be so aggravated by the EA communityâs initial response to covid-19 that he considered distancing himself from the movement. I can believe that Lewis might be correct because a) he has the credentials, b) the way heâs describing it is how it essentially always turns out when non-experts think they can outsmart experts in a scientific or medical field without first becoming experts themselves, and c) in areas where I do know enough to independently evaluate the plausibility of assertions made by people in the EA community on the object level, I feel as infuriated and incredulous as Lewis described feeling in that 80,000 Hours interview.
I see these sort of wildly overconfident claims about being able to breezily outsmart experts on difficult scientific, philosophical, or technical problems as moderately, but not dramatically, more credible than the people talking about UFOs or ESP or whatever. (Which apparently is not that rare.)
I see a general rhetorical or discursive strategy employed across many people with fringe views, be they around pseudoscience, fake medicine, or conspiracy theories. First, identify some scandal or blunder or internecine conflict within some scientific expert community. Second, say, âAha! Theyâre not so smart, after all!â Third, use this as support for whatever half-cocked pet theory you came up with. This is obviously a logically invalid argument, as in, obviously the conclusion does not logically follow from the premises. The standard for scientific experts should not be perfection; the standard for amateurs, dilettantes, and non-expert iconoclasts should be showing they can objectively do better than the average expert â not on a single coin flip, but on an objective, unbiased measure of overall performance.
There is a long history in the LessWrong community of opposition to institutional science, with the typical amount of intellectual failure that usually comes with opposition to institutional science. There is a long history of hyperconfidently scorning expert consensus and being dead wrong. Obviously, there is significant overlap between the LessWrong community and the EA community, and significant influence by the former on the latter. What I fear is that this anti-scientific attitude and undisciplined iconoclasm has become a mainstream, everyday part of the EA community, in a way that was not true, or at least not nearly as true, in my experience, in the early-to-mid-2010s.
The obvious rejoinder is: if you really can objectively outperform experts in any field you care to try your hand at for a few weeks, go make billions of dollars right now, or do any other sort of objectively impressive thing that would provide evidence for the idea that you have the abilities you think you do. Surely, within a few months or years of effort, you would have something to show for it. LessWrong has been around for a long time, EA has been around for a long time. Thereâs been plenty of time. Whatâs the excuse for why people havenât done this yet?
And, based on base rates, what would you say is more likely: people being misunderstood iconoclastic self-taught geniuses who are on the cusp of greatness or people just being overly confident based on a lack of experience and a lack of understanding of the problem space?
Just responding on this point since a comment of mine was linked to (re ESP):
I see these sort of wildly overconfident claims about being able to breezily outsmart experts on difficult scientific, philosophical, or technical problems as moderately, but not dramatically, more credible than the people talking about UFOs or ESP or whatever.
Are you sure that no-one with any credibility thinks UFOs may be extraterrestrial spacecraft?
And re these two topics and a few others, the experts (in the sense of those who have spent years researching them) are largely those who believe they are real, as they are taboo topics along mainstream scientists. Hence the latter are surprisingly ignorant about them, with little/âno knowledge of the research, and a tendency to resort to unscientific hand-wavy dismissals that donât stand up to scrutiny.
(Iâm not claiming to be an expert on either of these topics myself by the way, though I seem to be better read on them than most astronomers and psychologists.)
Is this a response to what Gregory Lewis said? I donât think I understand.
Maybe this is subtle/âcomplicated⌠Are the examples youâre citing the actual consensus views of experts? Or are they examples of governments and institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO) misunderstanding what the expert conensus and/âor misrepresenting the expert consensus to the public?
This excerpt from the Nature article you cited makes it sound like the latter:
Did random members of the EA community â as bright and eager as they might be â with no prior education, training, or experience with relevant fields like public health, epidemiology, virology, and medicine outsmart the majority of relevant experts on this question (airborne vs. not) or any others, not through sheer luck or chance, but by actually doing better research? This is a big claim, and if it is to be believed, it needs strong evidentiary support.
In this Nature article, there is an allegation that the WHO wasnât sufficiently epistemically modest or deferential to the appropriate class of experts:
And there is an allegation around communications, rather than around the science itself:
So, letâs say thereâs another pandemic. Which is the better strategy?
Strategy A: Read forum posts and blog posts by people in the EA community doing original research and opining on epidemiology, virology, and public health who have never so much cracked open a relevant textbook.
Strategy B: Survey sources of expert opinion, including publications like Nature, open letters written on behalf of expert communities, statements by academic and scientific organizations and so on, to determine if a particular institution like the WHO is accurately communicating the majority view of experts, or if theyâre a weird outlier adhering to a minority view, or just communicating the science badly.
I would say the Nature article is support for Strategy B and not at all support for Strategy A.
You could even interpret it as evidence against Strategy A. If you believe the criticism in Nature is right, even experts in an adjacent field or subfield, who have prestigious credentials like advising the WHO, can get things catastrophically wrong by being insufficiently epistemically modest and not deferring enough to the experts who know the most about a subject, and who have done the most research on it. If this is true, then that should make you even more skeptical about how reliable the research and recommendations will be from a non-expert blogger with no relevant education who only started learning about viruses and pandemics for the first time a few weeks ago.
What is described in the Nature piece sound like incredibly subtle mistakes (if we can for sure call them mistakes at this point). Lewisâ critique of the EA community is that it was making incredibly obvious, elementary mistakes. So, why think the EA community can outperform experts on avoiding subtle mistakes if it canât even avoid the obvious mistakes?
One of the recent examples of hubris I saw on the EA Forum was someone asserting that they (or the EA community at large) could resolve, within the next few months/âyears, the fundamental uncertainty around the philosophical assumptions that go into cost-effectiveness estimates comparing shrimp welfare and human welfare. Out of the topics I know well, the philosophy of consciousness might be #1, or at least near the top. I donât know how to convey the level of hubris that comment betrays.
It would be akin to saying that a few people in EA, with no training in physics, could figure out, in a few months or years, the correct theory of quantum gravity and reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics. Or that a few people in EA, with no training in biology or medicine, would be able to cure cancer within a few months or years. Or that, with no background in finance, business, or economics, that theyâd be able to launch an investment fund that consistently, sustainably achieves more alpha than the worldâs top-performing investment funds every year. Or that, with no background in engineering or science, theyâd be able to beat NASA and SpaceX in sending humans to Mars.
In other words, this is a level of hubris thatâs unfathomable, and just not a serious or credible way to look at the world or your own abilities, in the absence of strong, clear evidence that you possess even average abilities relative to the relevant expert class.
I donât know the first thing about epidemiology, virology, public health, or medicine. So, I canât independently evaluate how appropriate or correct it is/âwas for Gregory Lewis to be so aggravated by the EA communityâs initial response to covid-19 that he considered distancing himself from the movement. I can believe that Lewis might be correct because a) he has the credentials, b) the way heâs describing it is how it essentially always turns out when non-experts think they can outsmart experts in a scientific or medical field without first becoming experts themselves, and c) in areas where I do know enough to independently evaluate the plausibility of assertions made by people in the EA community on the object level, I feel as infuriated and incredulous as Lewis described feeling in that 80,000 Hours interview.
I see these sort of wildly overconfident claims about being able to breezily outsmart experts on difficult scientific, philosophical, or technical problems as moderately, but not dramatically, more credible than the people talking about UFOs or ESP or whatever. (Which apparently is not that rare.)
I see a general rhetorical or discursive strategy employed across many people with fringe views, be they around pseudoscience, fake medicine, or conspiracy theories. First, identify some scandal or blunder or internecine conflict within some scientific expert community. Second, say, âAha! Theyâre not so smart, after all!â Third, use this as support for whatever half-cocked pet theory you came up with. This is obviously a logically invalid argument, as in, obviously the conclusion does not logically follow from the premises. The standard for scientific experts should not be perfection; the standard for amateurs, dilettantes, and non-expert iconoclasts should be showing they can objectively do better than the average expert â not on a single coin flip, but on an objective, unbiased measure of overall performance.
There is a long history in the LessWrong community of opposition to institutional science, with the typical amount of intellectual failure that usually comes with opposition to institutional science. There is a long history of hyperconfidently scorning expert consensus and being dead wrong. Obviously, there is significant overlap between the LessWrong community and the EA community, and significant influence by the former on the latter. What I fear is that this anti-scientific attitude and undisciplined iconoclasm has become a mainstream, everyday part of the EA community, in a way that was not true, or at least not nearly as true, in my experience, in the early-to-mid-2010s.
The obvious rejoinder is: if you really can objectively outperform experts in any field you care to try your hand at for a few weeks, go make billions of dollars right now, or do any other sort of objectively impressive thing that would provide evidence for the idea that you have the abilities you think you do. Surely, within a few months or years of effort, you would have something to show for it. LessWrong has been around for a long time, EA has been around for a long time. Thereâs been plenty of time. Whatâs the excuse for why people havenât done this yet?
And, based on base rates, what would you say is more likely: people being misunderstood iconoclastic self-taught geniuses who are on the cusp of greatness or people just being overly confident based on a lack of experience and a lack of understanding of the problem space?
Just responding on this point since a comment of mine was linked to (re ESP):
Are you sure that no-one with any credibility thinks UFOs may be extraterrestrial spacecraft?
And re these two topics and a few others, the experts (in the sense of those who have spent years researching them) are largely those who believe they are real, as they are taboo topics along mainstream scientists. Hence the latter are surprisingly ignorant about them, with little/âno knowledge of the research, and a tendency to resort to unscientific hand-wavy dismissals that donât stand up to scrutiny.
(Iâm not claiming to be an expert on either of these topics myself by the way, though I seem to be better read on them than most astronomers and psychologists.)
Yes.