Ballantyne’s theses are that “trespassing is a widespread problem that crops up especially in the practice of interdisciplinary research,” and that “reflecting on trespassing should lead us to have greater intellectual modesty, in the sense that we will have good reason to be far less confident we have the right answers to many important questions.”
Finally, epistemic trespassing is when someone fails to answer questions reliably or responsibly due to a lack of relevant expertise.
I find the relationship between these 2 quotes interesting in that they both concern Epistemic Trespassing as it relates to answering questions outside one’s field of expertise, but not necessarily posing questions concerning evidence from fields you’re not an expert in.
You’re right that Ballantyne mainly focuses on epistemic trespassing as something related to question answering rather than question posing. I think this is related to his definition of a field as “an extremely narrow set of questions”; obviously trying to answer a set of questions without any of the relevant evidence and skills (that someone who works in the field has) would be trespassing. On the other hand, asking questions you’re not qualified to answer seems a lot more benign; there’s no expectation of reliability and little expectation of responsibility.
I suppose it’s still possible to cause harm in a way that resembles epistemic trespassing by asking questions. For example, a 9/11 truther with any Twitter following could sow confusion by asking “What’s the temperature at which steel beams melt?” when a plane crash investigator would dismiss that and instead ask “What’s the temperature at which steel beams lost most of their structural integrity?” What makes these questions important is not just their relation to the relevant field(s) of expertise, but their relation to the facts: the answer to the former question is a temperature higher than that at which jet fuel burns, and the answer to the latter is of course lower than the temperature of burning jet fuel. By asking the former and not the latter, the 9/11 truther uses their ignorance to portray an event with clear causes and explanations as fraught with mystery and open questions.
It seems like a strange conclusion however to say that many people are unqualified to ask many questions (that is, questions that relate to fields they haven’t studied). Maybe it would be more accurate to say that the reason the 9/11 truther is trespassing (and not merely curious) is that they’re asking questions in front of an audience (their Twitter followers) that sees them as an expert on that sort of question. Thus, the truther is irresponsibility speaking on behalf of the crash investigators, just as Linus Pauling spoke irresponsibility on behalf of the medical establishment.
Epistemic Status: My liberal arts education didn’t specialize in philosophy, although I’ve read a lot in a lot of different fields over the years, although I don’t have a list of ready sources to pull from aside from what I remember from my reading and youtube videos. Plus I grew up in a circle of highly respected academics and researchers, so I think I know things.
I’m pretty sure I understand what you mean, and I think I agree with your conclusions. I Still have some small questions.
My original question was initially about trespassing between established academic domains, and the business or governmental and non-governmental organizations that use their research. But I think the route you’ve gone is also incredibly important to consider.
Well said too. I think I understand your point well, and it seems very reasonable, and you’ve given me some room to think about and respond to what you’ve written, which I appreciate.
My original question was about whether Epistemic Trespassing also includes instances of asking questions of experts outside the questioners field of expertise (FOE?), in addition to providing answers outside the questioners FOE.
I think this is related to his [Ballantyne’s] definition of a field as “an extremely narrow set of questions”...
I might be jumping the gun, but to me this sort of seems ambiguous, in that the 9/11 truther who focuses on 9/11 might be said to also have an extremely narrow set of questions if they focus strictly on the metallurgical properties concerned (maybe?)
But additionally, if it’s the case that a field also requires answers, then it seems to be by necessity that fields also require experts to provide the answers, and if an authoritative field is populated by experts whose answers to the fields questions, provide some proof of truth (POT), than what would be considered pseudoscience would be a field whose experts provide answers which don’t reliably provide some POT?
So maybe it is also the sorts of questions being asked, and not just the answers provided, which could be taken to be pseudoscience? But not all Epistemic Trespassing comes from Pseudoscience. When it comes from other established and credible domains, is the classification of trespassing then only applied if the questions asked and the answers provided by the trespassing expert don’t provide POT? Or can merely asking questions which might be answered differently by the trespassing expert than the expert in the FOE being questioned, be considered trespassing even if they provide POT?
My second question has to do with this statement in the first paragraph:
...obviously trying to answer a set of questions without any of the relevant evidence and skills (that someone who works in the field has) would be trespassing.
As it relates in general to consideration of instances of trespassing (outside of academia for instance) I think there’s wiggle room in requiring only “any of the relevant evidence and skills”.
Obviously different areas of academic research often require specialized skills of the type I think you’re referring to (that someone who works in the field has), but there is also a lot of crossover between fields in terms of skills: critical thinking, footnoting, researching primary sources, etc. etc.
With a lot of the leaking going on around the world through sites like Wikileaks and other sources, a lot of evidence that would normally be kept from the public is being published for the public. Q-anon supporters for instance take this idea of top secret leaks and claim they have evidence which provides them with information that is ‘potentially more relevant’ than the evidence the real experts have or acknowledge the existence of.
So in that case it’s what many rational people can reasonably assume to be a false appeal to the relevant evidence criteria.
...the 9/11 truther uses their ignorance to portray an event with clear causes and explanations as fraught with mystery and open questions.
...what I think of as misinformation if unintentional, and disinformation if intentional.
It seems like a strange conclusion however to say that many people are unqualified to ask many questions (that is, questions that relate to fields they haven’t studied).
I agree again. But if that was the conclusion, and it was shared by many academics, I’d say that’s rationale for the academic Ivory Tower so many people are concerned about.
Back before University level education was widely available, I think an Ivory Tower would serve to archive knowledge that might be lost, whereas today, it might be seen as an impediment (along with many other things) to the dissemination and integration of useful research into the broader society. At the very least a gate keeping system of sorts. Still, there’s a lot more people clamoring at the gate these days, how to handle that is a different topic though.
Maybe it would be more accurate to say that the reason the 9/11 truther is trespassing (and not merely curious) is that they’re asking questions in front of an audience (their Twitter followers) that sees them as an expert on that sort of question.
This is where I think my original concern possibly comes from as it relates to asking questions of experts. As was pointed out earlier, Interdisciplinary Research is difficult for a number of reasons, Epistemic Trespassing being one of them. But what I’m picking up on now is that there is an approach vector of reasonably asking questions of experts, namely being curious. (I’m trying to be methodical in my thinking, not sarcastic btw.)
And what separates Epistemic Trespassing from Curiousity, is potentially the intentions of the questioner. Trying to assume the persona of Expert on a subject by ‘irresponsibly’ questioning those in the academic or professional fields concerned, especially in front of an audience, is qualitatively different than having strong, yet reasonable reservations about some of the answers supplied by the Expert being questioned—or the field in general—by individuals looking for answers besides the ones they’ve become uncomfortable with being asked to accept (in the hope of finding some better solutions than what is currently available, potentially) despite the forum for the discussion.
I think of SpaceX in this ‘Curious’ category, as the work they’ve done with Starship in just a dozen or so flight tests has come up with incredibly different approaches to Rocket Design, Launch, and Retrieval, which seem to potentially be the future of space travel, at least for the West. That’s not to say that SpaceX is reinventing the entire space program, only that they seem to be making progress on getting larger things to and from space, more cost effectively (hopefully safer as well) - while the endeavor of making and using those things that SpaceX puts up there, like satellites, potentially orbiters, rovers, and the associated instrumentation associated with scientific research remains mostly unchanged (for now).
So if I’m understanding correctly, since the continued success of the Starship prototyping seems to provide POT, then it wouldn’t be considered a case of Epistemic Trespassing in the field of rocketry. Essentially more to the point, the questions that SpaceX asked, eventually led to answering the question of “How do we get heavy things into and out of orbit safely and cost effectively?”, so that if they hadn’t asked the question, the progress made would not have happened.
Likely many of the questions they asked were the same, but some of them were qualitatively different than the ones NASA asked—or potentially the questions were the same, but the answers were different.
Maybe more to my point, I wonder how—as someone outside the fields of expertise I have an interest in positively influencing—do I have more intentional and productive influence through discussion with experts who might need some convincing, without being guilty of Epsitemic Trespassing.
Also, I think it needs to be said that I quite like what Ballentyne says here :
“reflecting on trespassing should lead us to have greater intellectual modesty, in the sense that we will have good reason to be far less confident we have the right answers to many important questions.”
My point being that because Western Tradition has continually broken down and fragmented areas of research and study, the accumulated knowledge of humanity is like the silk threads in a spiders web—very strong and attached to some stable objects, as well as laid out with some impressive mathematical precision for a spider—but also like a spiders web in that the apparent utility of the web is to allow most of the reality of the world pass through it while only catching a very specific kind of thing.
While useful for the purposes of catching insects, filling the gaps in- between those incredibly strong yet finite threads of knowledge to find some sort of Unified Theory of Everything is an inhuman task apparently. So it seems like the job will fall not to individual researchers in diverse fields working together to negate unhelpful aspects of Epistemic Trespassing, but rather to AGI that will essentially use the developing IT technologies to weave those threads together outside of the purview of the vast majority of spiders.
It makes sense to me to instead use AGI to help identity and negotiate areas of negligent Epistemic Trespassing in order to help human researchers do human scale research, within our abilities to perceive it.
How are the fields of AI and ML defined so that they can be held to some sort of standard of Epistemic Consideration of expertise outside their domains? Or are the concerns I bring up even relevant?
I find the relationship between these 2 quotes interesting in that they both concern Epistemic Trespassing as it relates to answering questions outside one’s field of expertise, but not necessarily posing questions concerning evidence from fields you’re not an expert in.
You’re right that Ballantyne mainly focuses on epistemic trespassing as something related to question answering rather than question posing. I think this is related to his definition of a field as “an extremely narrow set of questions”; obviously trying to answer a set of questions without any of the relevant evidence and skills (that someone who works in the field has) would be trespassing. On the other hand, asking questions you’re not qualified to answer seems a lot more benign; there’s no expectation of reliability and little expectation of responsibility.
I suppose it’s still possible to cause harm in a way that resembles epistemic trespassing by asking questions. For example, a 9/11 truther with any Twitter following could sow confusion by asking “What’s the temperature at which steel beams melt?” when a plane crash investigator would dismiss that and instead ask “What’s the temperature at which steel beams lost most of their structural integrity?” What makes these questions important is not just their relation to the relevant field(s) of expertise, but their relation to the facts: the answer to the former question is a temperature higher than that at which jet fuel burns, and the answer to the latter is of course lower than the temperature of burning jet fuel. By asking the former and not the latter, the 9/11 truther uses their ignorance to portray an event with clear causes and explanations as fraught with mystery and open questions.
It seems like a strange conclusion however to say that many people are unqualified to ask many questions (that is, questions that relate to fields they haven’t studied). Maybe it would be more accurate to say that the reason the 9/11 truther is trespassing (and not merely curious) is that they’re asking questions in front of an audience (their Twitter followers) that sees them as an expert on that sort of question. Thus, the truther is irresponsibility speaking on behalf of the crash investigators, just as Linus Pauling spoke irresponsibility on behalf of the medical establishment.
Epistemic Status: My liberal arts education didn’t specialize in philosophy, although I’ve read a lot in a lot of different fields over the years, although I don’t have a list of ready sources to pull from aside from what I remember from my reading and youtube videos. Plus I grew up in a circle of highly respected academics and researchers, so I think I know things.
I’m pretty sure I understand what you mean, and I think I agree with your conclusions. I Still have some small questions.
My original question was initially about trespassing between established academic domains, and the business or governmental and non-governmental organizations that use their research. But I think the route you’ve gone is also incredibly important to consider.
Well said too. I think I understand your point well, and it seems very reasonable, and you’ve given me some room to think about and respond to what you’ve written, which I appreciate.
My original question was about whether Epistemic Trespassing also includes instances of asking questions of experts outside the questioners field of expertise (FOE?), in addition to providing answers outside the questioners FOE.
I might be jumping the gun, but to me this sort of seems ambiguous, in that the 9/11 truther who focuses on 9/11 might be said to also have an extremely narrow set of questions if they focus strictly on the metallurgical properties concerned (maybe?)
But additionally, if it’s the case that a field also requires answers, then it seems to be by necessity that fields also require experts to provide the answers, and if an authoritative field is populated by experts whose answers to the fields questions, provide some proof of truth (POT), than what would be considered pseudoscience would be a field whose experts provide answers which don’t reliably provide some POT?
So maybe it is also the sorts of questions being asked, and not just the answers provided, which could be taken to be pseudoscience? But not all Epistemic Trespassing comes from Pseudoscience. When it comes from other established and credible domains, is the classification of trespassing then only applied if the questions asked and the answers provided by the trespassing expert don’t provide POT? Or can merely asking questions which might be answered differently by the trespassing expert than the expert in the FOE being questioned, be considered trespassing even if they provide POT?
My second question has to do with this statement in the first paragraph:
As it relates in general to consideration of instances of trespassing (outside of academia for instance) I think there’s wiggle room in requiring only “any of the relevant evidence and skills”.
Obviously different areas of academic research often require specialized skills of the type I think you’re referring to (that someone who works in the field has), but there is also a lot of crossover between fields in terms of skills: critical thinking, footnoting, researching primary sources, etc. etc.
With a lot of the leaking going on around the world through sites like Wikileaks and other sources, a lot of evidence that would normally be kept from the public is being published for the public. Q-anon supporters for instance take this idea of top secret leaks and claim they have evidence which provides them with information that is ‘potentially more relevant’ than the evidence the real experts have or acknowledge the existence of.
So in that case it’s what many rational people can reasonably assume to be a false appeal to the relevant evidence criteria.
...what I think of as misinformation if unintentional, and disinformation if intentional.
I agree again. But if that was the conclusion, and it was shared by many academics, I’d say that’s rationale for the academic Ivory Tower so many people are concerned about.
Back before University level education was widely available, I think an Ivory Tower would serve to archive knowledge that might be lost, whereas today, it might be seen as an impediment (along with many other things) to the dissemination and integration of useful research into the broader society. At the very least a gate keeping system of sorts. Still, there’s a lot more people clamoring at the gate these days, how to handle that is a different topic though.
This is where I think my original concern possibly comes from as it relates to asking questions of experts. As was pointed out earlier, Interdisciplinary Research is difficult for a number of reasons, Epistemic Trespassing being one of them. But what I’m picking up on now is that there is an approach vector of reasonably asking questions of experts, namely being curious. (I’m trying to be methodical in my thinking, not sarcastic btw.)
And what separates Epistemic Trespassing from Curiousity, is potentially the intentions of the questioner. Trying to assume the persona of Expert on a subject by ‘irresponsibly’ questioning those in the academic or professional fields concerned, especially in front of an audience, is qualitatively different than having strong, yet reasonable reservations about some of the answers supplied by the Expert being questioned—or the field in general—by individuals looking for answers besides the ones they’ve become uncomfortable with being asked to accept (in the hope of finding some better solutions than what is currently available, potentially) despite the forum for the discussion.
I think of SpaceX in this ‘Curious’ category, as the work they’ve done with Starship in just a dozen or so flight tests has come up with incredibly different approaches to Rocket Design, Launch, and Retrieval, which seem to potentially be the future of space travel, at least for the West. That’s not to say that SpaceX is reinventing the entire space program, only that they seem to be making progress on getting larger things to and from space, more cost effectively (hopefully safer as well) - while the endeavor of making and using those things that SpaceX puts up there, like satellites, potentially orbiters, rovers, and the associated instrumentation associated with scientific research remains mostly unchanged (for now).
So if I’m understanding correctly, since the continued success of the Starship prototyping seems to provide POT, then it wouldn’t be considered a case of Epistemic Trespassing in the field of rocketry. Essentially more to the point, the questions that SpaceX asked, eventually led to answering the question of “How do we get heavy things into and out of orbit safely and cost effectively?”, so that if they hadn’t asked the question, the progress made would not have happened.
Likely many of the questions they asked were the same, but some of them were qualitatively different than the ones NASA asked—or potentially the questions were the same, but the answers were different.
Maybe more to my point, I wonder how—as someone outside the fields of expertise I have an interest in positively influencing—do I have more intentional and productive influence through discussion with experts who might need some convincing, without being guilty of Epsitemic Trespassing.
Also, I think it needs to be said that I quite like what Ballentyne says here :
My point being that because Western Tradition has continually broken down and fragmented areas of research and study, the accumulated knowledge of humanity is like the silk threads in a spiders web—very strong and attached to some stable objects, as well as laid out with some impressive mathematical precision for a spider—but also like a spiders web in that the apparent utility of the web is to allow most of the reality of the world pass through it while only catching a very specific kind of thing.
While useful for the purposes of catching insects, filling the gaps in- between those incredibly strong yet finite threads of knowledge to find some sort of Unified Theory of Everything is an inhuman task apparently. So it seems like the job will fall not to individual researchers in diverse fields working together to negate unhelpful aspects of Epistemic Trespassing, but rather to AGI that will essentially use the developing IT technologies to weave those threads together outside of the purview of the vast majority of spiders.
It makes sense to me to instead use AGI to help identity and negotiate areas of negligent Epistemic Trespassing in order to help human researchers do human scale research, within our abilities to perceive it.
How are the fields of AI and ML defined so that they can be held to some sort of standard of Epistemic Consideration of expertise outside their domains? Or are the concerns I bring up even relevant?