(To be clear the above is an account of why I personally feel excited about CFAR having investigated circling. I think this also reasonably describes the motivations of many staff, and of CFAR’s behavior as an institution. But CFAR struggles with communicating research intuitions, too; I think in this case these intuitions did not propagate fully among our staff, and as a result that we did employ a few people for a while whose primary interest in circling seemed to me to be more like “for its own sake,” and who sometimes discussed it in ways which felt epistemically unhealthy to me. I think people correctly picked up on this as worrying, and I don’t want to suggest that didn’t happen; just that there is, I think, a sensible reason why CFAR as an institution tends to investigate local blindspots by searching for non-locals with a patch, thereby alarming locals about our epistemic allegiance).
(To be clear the above is an account of why I personally feel excited about CFAR having investigated circling. I think this also reasonably describes the motivations of many staff, and of CFAR’s behavior as an institution. But CFAR struggles with communicating research intuitions, too; I think in this case these intuitions did not propagate fully among our staff, and as a result that we did employ a few people for a while whose primary interest in circling seemed to me to be more like “for its own sake,” and who sometimes discussed it in ways which felt epistemically unhealthy to me. I think people correctly picked up on this as worrying, and I don’t want to suggest that didn’t happen; just that there is, I think, a sensible reason why CFAR as an institution tends to investigate local blindspots by searching for non-locals with a patch, thereby alarming locals about our epistemic allegiance).