Public discussion serves important non-information-transmission functions, e.g. building consensus, political maneuvering, norm enforcement, etc. In practice I think these are more important than information transmission.
While I broadly agree with the statement, the current top contender in my mind for why this is wrong, is a model whereby disagreement between key researchers in a field can be aided significantly by the other researchers, who hash out the lower-level details of the key researchers’ abstract intuitions.
An example of someone taking another’s ideas and implementing them concretely, is Eliezer’s A Human’s Guide to Words, being followed up by the application by Scott Alexander in the sequence Categorisation and Concepts. This helps to provide both a better understanding and a test of the abstract model. If two researchers disagree, others in their respective nearby inferential spaces can hash out many of the details. Naturally, this conversation can be aided by public discussion.
This is a model I’ve thought about but don’t yet feel I have strong evidence for.
While I broadly agree with the statement, the current top contender in my mind for why this is wrong, is a model whereby disagreement between key researchers in a field can be aided significantly by the other researchers, who hash out the lower-level details of the key researchers’ abstract intuitions.
An example of someone taking another’s ideas and implementing them concretely, is Eliezer’s A Human’s Guide to Words, being followed up by the application by Scott Alexander in the sequence Categorisation and Concepts. This helps to provide both a better understanding and a test of the abstract model. If two researchers disagree, others in their respective nearby inferential spaces can hash out many of the details. Naturally, this conversation can be aided by public discussion.
This is a model I’ve thought about but don’t yet feel I have strong evidence for.