The part about climate science seems like a pretty bog-standard outside view argument, which in turn means I find it largely uncompelling. Yes, there are people who are so stupid, they can only be saved from their own stupidity by executing an epistemic maneuver that works regardless of the intelligence of the person executing it. This does not thereby imply that everyone should execute the same maneuver, including people who are not that stupid, and therefore not in need of saving. If someone out there is so incompetent that they mistakenly perceive themselves as competent, then they are already lost, and the fact that an illegal (from the perspective of normative probability theory) epistemic maneuver exists which would save them if they executed it, does not thereby make that maneuver a normatively good move. (And even if it were, it’s not as though the people who would actually benefit from said maneuver are going to execute it—the whole reason that such people are loudly, confidently mistaken is that they don’t take the outside view seriously.)
In short: there is simply no principled justification for modesty-based arguments, and—though it may be somewhat impolite to say—I agree with Eliezer that people who find such arguments compelling are actually being influenced by social modesty norms (whether consciously or unconsciously), rather than any kind of normative judgment. Based on variouspoststhat Scott has written in the past, I would venture to say that he may be one of those people.
Part of this is pretty close to what I wrote in the actual debate. The part about climate science is new though and I’d like to see a response to it.
The part about climate science seems like a pretty bog-standard outside view argument, which in turn means I find it largely uncompelling. Yes, there are people who are so stupid, they can only be saved from their own stupidity by executing an epistemic maneuver that works regardless of the intelligence of the person executing it. This does not thereby imply that everyone should execute the same maneuver, including people who are not that stupid, and therefore not in need of saving. If someone out there is so incompetent that they mistakenly perceive themselves as competent, then they are already lost, and the fact that an illegal (from the perspective of normative probability theory) epistemic maneuver exists which would save them if they executed it, does not thereby make that maneuver a normatively good move. (And even if it were, it’s not as though the people who would actually benefit from said maneuver are going to execute it—the whole reason that such people are loudly, confidently mistaken is that they don’t take the outside view seriously.)
In short: there is simply no principled justification for modesty-based arguments, and—though it may be somewhat impolite to say—I agree with Eliezer that people who find such arguments compelling are actually being influenced by social modesty norms (whether consciously or unconsciously), rather than any kind of normative judgment. Based on various posts that Scott has written in the past, I would venture to say that he may be one of those people.