Any [. . .] hot takes on the quality of current EA epistemics?
It seems that many EAs have adopted Singer’s expanding circle narrative for thinking about important questions, without much scrutiny, and despite how Singer’s historical narrative is arguably highly incomplete (Singer’s relevant book also wasn’t trying to make a thorough historical argument). This suggests that many EAs aren’t giving enough scrutiny to other arguments from high-profile EAs, and pay too much attention to academic work that happens to come from EAs (even when it’s about questions like “why have many societies become more inclusive?”—questions that aren’t just of interest to EA-sympathetic researchers).
do you have thoughts on how much predictive (postdictive?) power your framework has on other randomly generated case studies?
Relatedly, do you think it’s likely that you will change your mind a lot if you read five more analogous case studies in a similar level of detail? What probability will you assign to reversing one of the core conclusions were you to do so?
Thoughts:
This framework seems (retroactively) predictively powerful for abolition and democratization in many countries. From a distance, it seems roughly predictive of other cases (e.g. factory farming, genocide), although there’s some cases that it seems to get wrong (e.g. it’s not clear to me what the economic incentives for decolonization were). It also seems less predictively useful when incentives seem balanced enough that predictions are ambiguous.
I’d be surprised but not shocked if I changed my mind about any given core conclusion. Maybe 30%? (Overall probability of reversing one core conclusion would depend on how narrowly we’re thinking of “core conclusion.”)
The main way that it seems like I could be wrong would be something like “under the right circumstances, social values are more influential than strong economic incentives.”
I’d be shocked if it turned out that social values are of dominant importance, and economic motives don’t matter much, for bringing about political inclusion/exclusion. That would require explaining away lots of historical evidence. 8%?
My median expectation is that I’d roughly keep the core conclusions and framework, add additional factors that contribute to one outcome or the other (additional ways in which political actors can be economically incentivized to support inclusion/exclusion), and change lots of finer details.
(Following up on my other reply)
It seems that many EAs have adopted Singer’s expanding circle narrative for thinking about important questions, without much scrutiny, and despite how Singer’s historical narrative is arguably highly incomplete (Singer’s relevant book also wasn’t trying to make a thorough historical argument). This suggests that many EAs aren’t giving enough scrutiny to other arguments from high-profile EAs, and pay too much attention to academic work that happens to come from EAs (even when it’s about questions like “why have many societies become more inclusive?”—questions that aren’t just of interest to EA-sympathetic researchers).
Thoughts:
This framework seems (retroactively) predictively powerful for abolition and democratization in many countries. From a distance, it seems roughly predictive of other cases (e.g. factory farming, genocide), although there’s some cases that it seems to get wrong (e.g. it’s not clear to me what the economic incentives for decolonization were). It also seems less predictively useful when incentives seem balanced enough that predictions are ambiguous.
I’d be surprised but not shocked if I changed my mind about any given core conclusion. Maybe 30%? (Overall probability of reversing one core conclusion would depend on how narrowly we’re thinking of “core conclusion.”)
The main way that it seems like I could be wrong would be something like “under the right circumstances, social values are more influential than strong economic incentives.”
I’d be shocked if it turned out that social values are of dominant importance, and economic motives don’t matter much, for bringing about political inclusion/exclusion. That would require explaining away lots of historical evidence. 8%?
My median expectation is that I’d roughly keep the core conclusions and framework, add additional factors that contribute to one outcome or the other (additional ways in which political actors can be economically incentivized to support inclusion/exclusion), and change lots of finer details.
Oh man your comments are so insightful! Strongly upvoted.
Will carefully consider if I have follow-up questions later.