I’m worried about a potential future dynamic where an emphasis on forecasting/quantification in EA (especially if it has significant social or career implications) will have adverse effects on making people bias towards silence/vagueness in areas where they don’t feel ready to commit to a probability forecast.
I think it’s good that we appear to be moving in the direction of greater quantification and being accountable for probability estimates, but I think there’s the very real risk that people see this and then become scared of committing their loose thoughts/intuitive probability estimates on record. This may result in us getting overall worse group epistemics because people hedge too much and are unwilling to commit to public probabilities.
See analogy to Jeff Kaufman’s arguments on responsible transparency consumption:
I’m worried about a potential future dynamic where an emphasis on forecasting/quantification in EA (especially if it has significant social or career implications) will have adverse effects on making people bias towards silence/vagueness in areas where they don’t feel ready to commit to a probability forecast.
I think it’s good that we appear to be moving in the direction of greater quantification and being accountable for probability estimates, but I think there’s the very real risk that people see this and then become scared of committing their loose thoughts/intuitive probability estimates on record. This may result in us getting overall worse group epistemics because people hedge too much and are unwilling to commit to public probabilities.
See analogy to Jeff Kaufman’s arguments on responsible transparency consumption:
https://www.jefftk.com/p/responsible-transparency-consumption