I really like Social Epistemology except for the crucial flaw that I havenât heard it called that before. Without the ability for people to recognize it, I think itâs worse than Epistemic Humility. (Normally Iâd prefer the more general term, rather than a term for one strategy within the space.)
Do you mean you havenât heard the term social epistemology, or that you havenât heard epistemic humility specifically (or debates around that) referred to by the term social epistemology?
Iâd envision this tag including not just things like âHow epistemically humble should we be, and how should we update given other peopleâs statements/âbeliefs?â, but also things like when we should give just our conclusions vs also our reasoning if weâre concerned about information cascades, and to what extent publicly stating explicit estimates will cause anchoring by others. Those things could arguably be seen as about epistemic humility in that theyâre about how to communicate givenhow other people might handle epistemic humility, but saying theyâre about social epistemology (or something else) seems more natural to me.
(That said, I think Iâm only familiar with the term social epistemology from how itâs occasionally used by EAs, and the Wikipedia articleâs lead section makes me uncertain if theyâre using the term in the standard way.)
Maybe the best tag label would be Epistemic Humility & Social Epistemology, to put the term thatâs more common in EA first? Thatâs a longer label than average, though.
FWIW, both my suggestion of this tag and my suggestion of the term social epistemology for it were prompted by the following part of Owen Cotton-Barrattâs recent post:
Learning can be much more efficient if we allow the transmission of heuristics between people, but if you donât require people to have any grounding in their own experience or cases theyâve directly heard about, itâs possible for heuristics to be propagated without regard for whether theyâre still useful, or if the underlying circumstances have changed enough that they shouldnât be applied. Navigating this tension is an interesting problem in social epistemology.
I really like Social Epistemology except for the crucial flaw that I havenât heard it called that before. Without the ability for people to recognize it, I think itâs worse than Epistemic Humility. (Normally Iâd prefer the more general term, rather than a term for one strategy within the space.)
Do you mean you havenât heard the term social epistemology, or that you havenât heard epistemic humility specifically (or debates around that) referred to by the term social epistemology?
Iâd envision this tag including not just things like âHow epistemically humble should we be, and how should we update given other peopleâs statements/âbeliefs?â, but also things like when we should give just our conclusions vs also our reasoning if weâre concerned about information cascades, and to what extent publicly stating explicit estimates will cause anchoring by others. Those things could arguably be seen as about epistemic humility in that theyâre about how to communicate given how other people might handle epistemic humility, but saying theyâre about social epistemology (or something else) seems more natural to me.
(That said, I think Iâm only familiar with the term social epistemology from how itâs occasionally used by EAs, and the Wikipedia articleâs lead section makes me uncertain if theyâre using the term in the standard way.)
Maybe the best tag label would be Epistemic Humility & Social Epistemology, to put the term thatâs more common in EA first? Thatâs a longer label than average, though.
FWIW, both my suggestion of this tag and my suggestion of the term social epistemology for it were prompted by the following part of Owen Cotton-Barrattâs recent post:
I have now read the post that contains Social Epistemology.
I also wasnât clear before, but I was biasing towards one shorter label or another.