“Breakthroughs” feel like the wrong thing to hope for from posts written by non-experts. A lot of the LW posts that the community now seems to consider most valuable weren’t “breakthroughs”. They were more like explaining a thing, such that each individual fact in the explanation was already known, but the synthesis of them into a single coherent explanation that made sense either hadn’t previously been done, or had been done only within the context of an academic field buried in inferential distance. Put another way, it seems like it’s possible to write good popularizations of a topic without being intimately familiar with the existing literature, if it’s the right kind of topic. Though I imagine this wouldn’t be much comfort to someone who is pessimistic about the epistemic value of popularizations in general.
The Huemer post kind of just felt like an argument for radical skepticism outside of one’s own domain of narrow expertise, with everything that implies.
“Breakthroughs” feel like the wrong thing to hope for from posts written by non-experts. A lot of the LW posts that the community now seems to consider most valuable weren’t “breakthroughs”. They were more like explaining a thing, such that each individual fact in the explanation was already known, but the synthesis of them into a single coherent explanation that made sense either hadn’t previously been done, or had been done only within the context of an academic field buried in inferential distance. Put another way, it seems like it’s possible to write good popularizations of a topic without being intimately familiar with the existing literature, if it’s the right kind of topic. Though I imagine this wouldn’t be much comfort to someone who is pessimistic about the epistemic value of popularizations in general.
The Huemer post kind of just felt like an argument for radical skepticism outside of one’s own domain of narrow expertise, with everything that implies.