I think the word “technical” is a red herring here. If someone tells me a flood is coming, I don’t much care how much they know about hydrodynamics, even if in principle this knowledge might allow me to model the threat with more confidence. Rather, I care about things like e.g. how sure they are about the direction from which the flood is coming, about the topography of our surroundings, etc. Personally, I expect I’d be much more inclined to make large/confident updates on the basis of information at levels of abstraction like these, than at levels about e.g. hydrodynamics or particle physics or so forth, however much more “technical,” or related-in-principle in some abstract reductionist sense, the latter may be.
I do think there are also many arguments beyond this simple one which clearly justify additional (and more confident) concern. But I try to assess such arguments based on how compelling they are, where “technical precision” is one, but hardly the only factor which might influence this; e.g., another is whether the argument even involves the relevant level of abstraction, or bears on the question at hand.
I think the word “technical” is a red herring here. If someone tells me a flood is coming, I don’t much care how much they know about hydrodynamics, even if in principle this knowledge might allow me to model the threat with more confidence. Rather, I care about things like e.g. how sure they are about the direction from which the flood is coming, about the topography of our surroundings, etc. Personally, I expect I’d be much more inclined to make large/confident updates on the basis of information at levels of abstraction like these, than at levels about e.g. hydrodynamics or particle physics or so forth, however much more “technical,” or related-in-principle in some abstract reductionist sense, the latter may be.
I do think there are also many arguments beyond this simple one which clearly justify additional (and more confident) concern. But I try to assess such arguments based on how compelling they are, where “technical precision” is one, but hardly the only factor which might influence this; e.g., another is whether the argument even involves the relevant level of abstraction, or bears on the question at hand.