This is an example of the illusion of transparency issue. Many salient interpretations of what this means (informed by the popularposts on the topic, that are actually not explicitly on this topic) motivate actions that I consider deleterious overall, like punishing half-baked/wild/probably-wrong hypotheses or things that are not obsequiously disclaimed as such, in a way that’s insensitive to the actual level of danger of being misleading. A more salient cost is nonsense hogging attention, but that doesn’t distinguish it from well-reasoned clear points that don’t add insight hogging attention.
The actually serious problem is when this is a symptom of not distinguishing epistemic status of ideas on part of the author, but then it’s not at all clear that punishing publication of such thoughts helps the author fix the problem. The personal skill of tagging epistemic status of ideas in one’s own mind correctly is what I think of as epistemic hygiene, but I don’t expect this to be canon, and I’m not sure that there is no serious disagreement on this point with people who also thought about this. For one, the interpretation I have doesn’t specify community norms, and I don’t know what epistemic-hygiene-the-norm should be.
This is an example of the illusion of transparency issue. Many salient interpretations of what this means (informed by the popular posts on the topic, that are actually not explicitly on this topic) motivate actions that I consider deleterious overall, like punishing half-baked/wild/probably-wrong hypotheses or things that are not obsequiously disclaimed as such, in a way that’s insensitive to the actual level of danger of being misleading. A more salient cost is nonsense hogging attention, but that doesn’t distinguish it from well-reasoned clear points that don’t add insight hogging attention.
The actually serious problem is when this is a symptom of not distinguishing epistemic status of ideas on part of the author, but then it’s not at all clear that punishing publication of such thoughts helps the author fix the problem. The personal skill of tagging epistemic status of ideas in one’s own mind correctly is what I think of as epistemic hygiene, but I don’t expect this to be canon, and I’m not sure that there is no serious disagreement on this point with people who also thought about this. For one, the interpretation I have doesn’t specify community norms, and I don’t know what epistemic-hygiene-the-norm should be.