seemingly faultless argument for a seemingly crazy conclusion
My vision of broad-based collective epistemic uplift mainly goes via improving salience of reasonable nuance and important context, about e.g. what lines of argument and evidence support a given case, who has which interests and has done what shady stuff, and what alternative positions there are. On the whole I don’t want (or need?) there to be too many crazy-seeming conclusions being argued by long-winded chains of reasoning.
For more targeted institutional foresight, say (e.g. tech-tree and AI-progress futures work), sometimes you do just need a bunch of detailed evidence. I think that’s ultimately only going to work on people who have the time and willingness to spend that effort, but we can make tools and systems which help them leverage that effort, and which serve up the most important info.
(I previously commented this privately and your response was interesting, I didn’t get round to/know how to respond, but I’m interested in the thread and in others’ thoughts.)
My vision of broad-based collective epistemic uplift mainly goes via improving salience of reasonable nuance and important context, about e.g. what lines of argument and evidence support a given case, who has which interests and has done what shady stuff, and what alternative positions there are. On the whole I don’t want (or need?) there to be too many crazy-seeming conclusions being argued by long-winded chains of reasoning.
For more targeted institutional foresight, say (e.g. tech-tree and AI-progress futures work), sometimes you do just need a bunch of detailed evidence. I think that’s ultimately only going to work on people who have the time and willingness to spend that effort, but we can make tools and systems which help them leverage that effort, and which serve up the most important info.
(I previously commented this privately and your response was interesting, I didn’t get round to/know how to respond, but I’m interested in the thread and in others’ thoughts.)
point taken! I think I might be more sceptical than you about context provision, for the same general reason that argument mapping is hard.
I wonder about crazy-seeming conclusions. I think we maybe will need them? maybe a useful prompt is ‘how could AIFEC have helped in the pandemic?’
(aforementioned reply from aforementioned private discussion)