Thanks for writing this post. I found it interesting and I love that you suggest practical takeaways. Overall, my one-line takeaway is something like that suggested in Michael Plantâs comment: âdefer to the experts, except those that seem to have poor epistemics or unreasonable object-level beliefsâ.
It seems to me like the arguments presented in section 2 leaves us with a slightly weaker version of the Object-level Reasons Restriction, but still keeps us very constrained in our use of object-level considerations.
Letâs model experts as having a knowledge base (that includes broad beliefs like âhomeopathy canât workâ and more detailed facts like particular ways in which serotonin interacts with melatonin) and some level of epistemic quality (how well they can derive new information from their knowledge base). I take your argument to basically be âwe should consider their underlying knowledge base when assessing how much we should defer to them, and give a heavy penalty for unreasonable beliefs that relate to our object of inspectionâ.
An expert that believes in homeopathy has a wrong model of how medicine works. We know this because there is an expert consensus against homeopathy (sort of). This means that his deduction of our statement of interest would potentially be clouded by false facts and intuitions.
My point here is that it is not exactly what Iâd describe as an object-level claim. Or at least, something far enough away that we can find a different set of experts to check against or that we might be experts in ourselves (so again, acting from modesty).
Thanks for writing this post. I found it interesting and I love that you suggest practical takeaways. Overall, my one-line takeaway is something like that suggested in Michael Plantâs comment: âdefer to the experts, except those that seem to have poor epistemics or unreasonable object-level beliefsâ.
It seems to me like the arguments presented in section 2 leaves us with a slightly weaker version of the Object-level Reasons Restriction, but still keeps us very constrained in our use of object-level considerations.
Letâs model experts as having a knowledge base (that includes broad beliefs like âhomeopathy canât workâ and more detailed facts like particular ways in which serotonin interacts with melatonin) and some level of epistemic quality (how well they can derive new information from their knowledge base). I take your argument to basically be âwe should consider their underlying knowledge base when assessing how much we should defer to them, and give a heavy penalty for unreasonable beliefs that relate to our object of inspectionâ.
An expert that believes in homeopathy has a wrong model of how medicine works. We know this because there is an expert consensus against homeopathy (sort of). This means that his deduction of our statement of interest would potentially be clouded by false facts and intuitions.
My point here is that it is not exactly what Iâd describe as an object-level claim. Or at least, something far enough away that we can find a different set of experts to check against or that we might be experts in ourselves (so again, acting from modesty).