I agree the factors you mention are relevant, but in my mind they don’t reduce the risk of misinterpretation to be low enough to make it not worth adding a sentence or two of explicit statement or explanation of the remaining risks. I think the main difference with something like climate change is that the latter is much more well-known and anyone reading an article about a partial solution is highly likely to already have a good idea of the overall shape of the problem (thus making the analogous misinterpretation very unlikely), and this can’t be said for an article on “AI for epistemics”.
I don’t think that discovering a solution to metaphilosophy would be sufficient, because a big part of the problem is that people might not care about doing good philosophy even if a solution existed.
Yeah I worry about this a lot too, but solving metaphilosophy can plausibly help substantially here, similar to how solving (in large part) the philosophy of math and science has (directly or indirectly) made many more people care about doing good math and science. Directly, it seems a lot easier to care about something if you actually understood what it really is, as that would likely tell you a lot about why it might be valuable. Indirectly, it would likely speed up philosophical progress and make it more prestigious, less contentious, appear less wasteful/pointless (to many), etc.
I agree the factors you mention are relevant, but in my mind they don’t reduce the risk of misinterpretation to be low enough to make it not worth adding a sentence or two of explicit statement or explanation of the remaining risks. I think the main difference with something like climate change is that the latter is much more well-known and anyone reading an article about a partial solution is highly likely to already have a good idea of the overall shape of the problem (thus making the analogous misinterpretation very unlikely), and this can’t be said for an article on “AI for epistemics”.
Yeah I worry about this a lot too, but solving metaphilosophy can plausibly help substantially here, similar to how solving (in large part) the philosophy of math and science has (directly or indirectly) made many more people care about doing good math and science. Directly, it seems a lot easier to care about something if you actually understood what it really is, as that would likely tell you a lot about why it might be valuable. Indirectly, it would likely speed up philosophical progress and make it more prestigious, less contentious, appear less wasteful/pointless (to many), etc.