A few clarifications that seem worth making for posterity:
[Epistemic status: none of this was or is anything I’m especially confident in. But I’m relatively meta-confident that if you think the answers here are obvious, you’re typical minding on how obvious your particular world/morality-model is]
To be clear, I eat meat, and I devote a lot of effort to improving my honesty, meta-honesty and integrity. I expect the median scientist to be in a fairly different epistemic and agentic position that I am.
There were a couple mistakes that I noticed or had pointed out to me after making the above comment. One of them is discussed here.
For the point I was actually trying to make, a perhaps less (or differently?) distracting example would be: “If I’m a median academic, it’s not obvious whether I should try to become more honest* than the median academic, or try to, I dunno, recycle more or something.”
*where I think “honesty” is a skill, built out of various sub-skills including social resilience, introspection, etc.
This question might have different answers depending on how dishonest or honest you think the median academic is.
I do not think recycling is very important. [edit: concretely, it is definitely less important than academic honesty by a large margin]. But the world is full of things that might possibly be important for me to do, and figuring out which of them matter and why is hard. I expect the median academic to have put very little thought into their morality. If they think improving their honesty is more important, or improving their recycling is more important, I think this says very little about how good they are at choosing moral principles, and has much more to do with having happened to accidentally bump into a set of friends/family/etc that priorities honesty or recycling or veganism or whatever.
I think the most important thing the median academic should do is become more socially resilient, agenty, and good at moral reasoning.
If a median academic decides that becoming more-honest-than-the-median academic is an important priority, I stand by the claim that they should very quickly be moving towards “figure out how to change their social environment to make it easier to coordinate on honesty.” I think this dwarfs whatever their own independent efforts towards improving at honesty are.
A few clarifications that seem worth making for posterity:
[Epistemic status: none of this was or is anything I’m especially confident in. But I’m relatively meta-confident that if you think the answers here are obvious, you’re typical minding on how obvious your particular world/morality-model is]
To be clear, I eat meat, and I devote a lot of effort to improving my honesty, meta-honesty and integrity. I expect the median scientist to be in a fairly different epistemic and agentic position that I am.
There were a couple mistakes that I noticed or had pointed out to me after making the above comment. One of them is discussed here.
For the point I was actually trying to make, a perhaps less (or differently?) distracting example would be: “If I’m a median academic, it’s not obvious whether I should try to become more honest* than the median academic, or try to, I dunno, recycle more or something.”
*where I think “honesty” is a skill, built out of various sub-skills including social resilience, introspection, etc.
This question might have different answers depending on how dishonest or honest you think the median academic is.
I do not think recycling is very important. [edit: concretely, it is definitely less important than academic honesty by a large margin]. But the world is full of things that might possibly be important for me to do, and figuring out which of them matter and why is hard. I expect the median academic to have put very little thought into their morality. If they think improving their honesty is more important, or improving their recycling is more important, I think this says very little about how good they are at choosing moral principles, and has much more to do with having happened to accidentally bump into a set of friends/family/etc that priorities honesty or recycling or veganism or whatever.
I think the most important thing the median academic should do is become more socially resilient, agenty, and good at moral reasoning.
If a median academic decides that becoming more-honest-than-the-median academic is an important priority, I stand by the claim that they should very quickly be moving towards “figure out how to change their social environment to make it easier to coordinate on honesty.” I think this dwarfs whatever their own independent efforts towards improving at honesty are.