By all means check out the arguments, but argument doesn’t screen off authority, for roughly the reasons Robin Hanson mentions in that thread. Few human beings ever have verbalizable access to all their evidence, and you would be a fool not to take expertise into account so far as you can determine it, even for unusually well-documented arguments. I encourage you to keep scrutinizing EY’s track record—and those of any other contributors you often read. (BTW I upvoted VN’s comment, to help ever so slightly in this endeavor.)
Few human beings ever have verbalizable access to all their evidence,
This being the case it indicates that the authority is screened of imperfectly, to the degree that the arguments are presented. For example if the arguments presented by the authority are flawed the degree of trust in their authority is drastically reduced. After all part of the information represented by the awareness of their authority is the expectation that their thinking wouldn’t be terrible when they tried to express it. That turned out to be false so the earlier assumption must be discarded.
Yep. Moreover, readers can actually look up the sources for the ideas in the Sequences; the people who actually did the science or proved the math. They’re mostly cited. Just off the top of my head — Jaynes’ probability theory (with Good, Cox, et al as influences there), Pearl’s causality, Kahneman and Tversky’s heuristics-and-biases program, Tooby and Cosmides on evolutionary psychology, Axelrod’s Prisoners’ Dilemma, Korzybski’s map-vs.-territory distinction, …
Relevant: Don’t Revere The Bearer Of Good Info, Argument Screens Off Authority. Sequences are to a significant extent a presentation of a certain selection of standard ideas, which can be judged on their own merit.
By all means check out the arguments, but argument doesn’t screen off authority, for roughly the reasons Robin Hanson mentions in that thread. Few human beings ever have verbalizable access to all their evidence, and you would be a fool not to take expertise into account so far as you can determine it, even for unusually well-documented arguments. I encourage you to keep scrutinizing EY’s track record—and those of any other contributors you often read. (BTW I upvoted VN’s comment, to help ever so slightly in this endeavor.)
This being the case it indicates that the authority is screened of imperfectly, to the degree that the arguments are presented. For example if the arguments presented by the authority are flawed the degree of trust in their authority is drastically reduced. After all part of the information represented by the awareness of their authority is the expectation that their thinking wouldn’t be terrible when they tried to express it. That turned out to be false so the earlier assumption must be discarded.
Yep. Moreover, readers can actually look up the sources for the ideas in the Sequences; the people who actually did the science or proved the math. They’re mostly cited. Just off the top of my head — Jaynes’ probability theory (with Good, Cox, et al as influences there), Pearl’s causality, Kahneman and Tversky’s heuristics-and-biases program, Tooby and Cosmides on evolutionary psychology, Axelrod’s Prisoners’ Dilemma, Korzybski’s map-vs.-territory distinction, …