It may be good to think of Standpoint Epistemology as an erisology, i.e. a theory of disagreement. If you observe a disagreement, Standpoint Epistemology provides one possible answer for what that disagreement means and how to handle it.
Then why call it an epistemology? Call it Standpoint Erisology. But...
According to Standpoint Epistemology, people get their opinions and beliefs about the world through their experiences (also called their standpoint). However, a single experience will only reveal part of the world, and so in order to get a more comprehensive perspective, one must combine multiple experiences. In this way the ontology of Standpoint Epistemology heavily resembles rationalist-empiricist epistemologies such as Bayesian Epistemology, which also assert that people get their opinions by accumulating experiences that contain partial information.
This is already clearly epistemological. So calling it just a theory of disagreement seems already out of place. This also sets up a motte and bailey. Once the less standard claims, like “white people need to shut up and listen”, get criticized, it will be possible to claim it’s only saying that “people get their opinions and beliefs about the world through their experiences” which “heavily resembles rationalist-empiricist epistemologies such as Bayesian Epistemology”, which begs the question why it needs a special name at all.
One important difference is that whereas rationalists often focus on individual epistemology, such as overcoming biased heuristics or learning to build evidence into theories, Standpoint Epistemology instead focuses on what one can learn from other people’s experiences. (...) As such, Standpoint Epistemology emphasizes that if someone tells you about something that you haven’t had experience with, you should take this as a learning opportunity
So it’s a pointer to a useful source of information?? A technique for gathering it? That would be a much simpler and clearer argument to make than trying to cast this as an epistemology and comparing it with Bayesian epistemology.
it can be mathematically proven from the assumptions of Bayesian Epistemology, in a theorem known as Aumann’s Agreement Theorem
Aumann’s Theorem requires two honest Bayesians with the same prior. You definitely can’t just assume that about everybody (and how much it applies to rationalists is also debatable). But really that’s irrelevant, you don’t need Aumann to make this point—every observation is Bayesian evidence, including what people say[1], which makes this point trivial, and again raises the question of why it needs to be a special epistemology.
10 participants
When you interview so few people you can easily get a biased sample out of pure randomness. This is the same ol’ point of anecdotes vs data. The former lets you go deep, but risks missing the full picture and getting bogged down in noise (like dishonesty and outliers), and the latter lets you go wide and cut through noise, but risks a shallow understanding.
Really, they’re best when used together. anecdotes help you learn what to study widely, and data lets you situate anecdotes inside a larger context. So instead of hearing the “experience of a black person” (Which is pretty abstract) you can hear the experience of someone in the X percentile of income, Y percentile of educational attainment, living in a Z percentile rate of crime city, etc.. By using both you can get a truly full picture. e.g, see how many blacks (compared absolutely and relatively with whites) have how much income, and then see in depth through interviews how it is to be a poor black person, a median income black person, and a rich black person. Same with racism, you can use data to approximate how many people experience racism, and then go deeper to see how it is to experience heavy racism, to experience light racism, no racism at all, or even ‘reverse’ racism (where people treat you better because of your race).
And I’d like to stress, that this is all still trivial inside a Bayesian framework (or even just a “commonsense” framework).
So let’s think of how we should respond to hearing one response in the survey. As Bayesians, before taking the anecdote at face value, we should consider what information it actually constitutes. We should consider the sample (black people who use the survey website), and ask how much should we trust the sample (or people in general, if there’s no reason to expect a relevant difference) to be honest, have good judgement, have good memory, and be equally likely to report both good and bad experiences. And then we should consider how surprising it is to hear a specific anecdote from someone in the sample. My point isn’t to answer any of these questions, but to point out that Bayes doesn’t allow you to just take the responses at face value, as standpoint epistemology may instruct you to do. if it does, it’s false, and if it doesn’t then it’s trivial.
I asked black people to describe their experiences, but I haven’t allocated time to ask police about their experiences.
This is treating this like a conflict and going to hear the other side before even checking how different the experience of black people is to white people (unless you base off your experience, which I guess standpoint epistemology would approve of). Not that I disapprove of learning about police officer’s experiences, but first make sure you have the experience of the first group situated correctly in the larger context.
To conclude, your post gives an extremely trivial account of “standpoint epistemology” (except the mention of “white people need to shut up and listen”) which makes me disagree with the framing more than the content (I downvoted for the framing, but were it missing I would probably upvote for the content). “Standpoint Epistemology” is either trivial, like it’s explained here, in which case the framing is bad and I suggest dropping it, or it’s non-trivial, in which case it should be judged on the merits of its non-trivial claims, which from what I’ve read and heard, I believe are entirely mistaken (I might explore this further in a followup comment).
And as this is LessWrong, perhaps a good final question is, would you want to code standpoint epistemology into an AGI? Either there’s something not contained in a bayes-like epistemology you would want it to do, in which case, what is it? Or it’s fully contained inside such an epistemology, in which case it’s too trivial for the framing.
Then why call it an epistemology? Call it Standpoint Erisology. But...
Erisology is a very recently coined term, whereas the standard is to call it an epistemology. Also, as you point out, there are epistemological elements to it, and part of why I’m emphasizing the erisology angle is because I’ve been thinking of writing about a typology of erisologies that I have coined:
Mistake theory (disagreements originate in mistakes):
ability erisology: some people are smarter (or otherwise better) than others and this leads to disagreements between the informed and the uninformed
standpoint erisology: people have different experiences, leading to different beliefs, and if they cannot pool their info to come to a shared set of knowledge, then they end up persistently disagreeing
Conflict theory (disagreements originate in conflict):
battle erisology: some people represent concerns that are in tension with your concerns and they are trying to promote their concerns by spreading lies and interfering in communication
trauma erisology: different people have had different negative experiences that makes them avoid different sources of information, leading to them having different opinions due to their different sources of information
(Trauma erisology would be conflict theory because the “negative experiences” are usually related to conflict.)
This also sets up a motte and bailey. Once the less standard claims, like “white people need to shut up and listen”, get criticized, it will be possible to claim it’s only saying that “people get their opinions and beliefs about the world through their experiences” which “heavily resembles rationalist-empiricist epistemologies such as Bayesian Epistemology”, which begs the question why it needs a special name at all.
“Sets up a motte and bailey” sounds like nonsense to me. Any time you mention multiple things, it is possible to ignore critiques of the less-defensible things and shift the discussion to the more-defensible claims.
If someone directly disagreed with the whole “white people need to shut up and listen” element, I wouldn’t deny that I’ve linked to that, and would instead engage with that area.
So it’s a pointer to a useful source of information?? A technique for gathering it? That would be a much simpler and clearer argument to make than trying to cast this as an epistemology and comparing it with Bayesian epistemology.
I’ve found it (or rather, theories adjacent to it which I learned before I got into this specific instantiation of it) to have profound implications for how I’ve been thinking about knowledge and evidence. 🤷 If you have already integrated the lessons for this, then maybe it is less profound to you.
Aumann’s Theorem requires two honest Bayesians with the same prior. You definitely can’t just assume that about everybody (and how much it applies to rationalists is also debatable).
It definitely has assumptions, but also you shouldn’t get distracted by the boilerplate. As long as we can agree that black people aren’t generally liars or crazy, we should expect there to be a ton of value in listening to their experiences.
When you interview so few people you can easily get a biased sample out of pure randomness. [...]
Really, they’re best when used together. anecdotes help you learn what to study widely, and data lets you situate anecdotes inside a larger context. [...]
I’ve definitely considered using these sorts of stories as inspirations for more rigid quantitative statistics. I didn’t get into this as part of this study because I didn’t have time to make it a huge comprehensive thing.
I agree that my study doesn’t very precisely determine how big of a problem it is, but I think it is still quite informative. Obviously how informative it is depends on what conclusions you want to draw, but I’ve laid the stories bare rather than abstracting them into any sorts of problematic conclusions.
This is treating this like a conflict and going to hear the other side before even checking how different the experience of black people is to white people (unless you base off your experience, which I guess standpoint epistemology would approve of).
There’s obvious tradeoffs in how well the police treat the black people they encounter vs how the police handle the black criminals they encounter, because the police do not necessarily know ahead of time who is criminal or not. Understanding what areas black people could get treated better versus what areas police face danger might help enlighten us on things like Pareto improvements to the treatment, or places where the treatment is inherently unfair to one side or the other.
It’s not clear to me how comparing the differences of the experience of black people to white people ends up working out. For all I know, white people’s experiences of the police might be “I haven’t interacted with the police”. (That’s my experience, but 1. I don’t live in the US, 2. I am 99.9% introversion, so my experience doesn’t necessarily generalize to Americans in general.)
Then why call it an epistemology? Call it Standpoint Erisology. But...
This is already clearly epistemological. So calling it just a theory of disagreement seems already out of place. This also sets up a motte and bailey. Once the less standard claims, like “white people need to shut up and listen”, get criticized, it will be possible to claim it’s only saying that “people get their opinions and beliefs about the world through their experiences” which “heavily resembles rationalist-empiricist epistemologies such as Bayesian Epistemology”, which begs the question why it needs a special name at all.
So it’s a pointer to a useful source of information?? A technique for gathering it? That would be a much simpler and clearer argument to make than trying to cast this as an epistemology and comparing it with Bayesian epistemology.
Aumann’s Theorem requires two honest Bayesians with the same prior. You definitely can’t just assume that about everybody (and how much it applies to rationalists is also debatable). But really that’s irrelevant, you don’t need Aumann to make this point—every observation is Bayesian evidence, including what people say[1], which makes this point trivial, and again raises the question of why it needs to be a special epistemology.
When you interview so few people you can easily get a biased sample out of pure randomness. This is the same ol’ point of anecdotes vs data. The former lets you go deep, but risks missing the full picture and getting bogged down in noise (like dishonesty and outliers), and the latter lets you go wide and cut through noise, but risks a shallow understanding.
Really, they’re best when used together. anecdotes help you learn what to study widely, and data lets you situate anecdotes inside a larger context. So instead of hearing the “experience of a black person” (Which is pretty abstract) you can hear the experience of someone in the X percentile of income, Y percentile of educational attainment, living in a Z percentile rate of crime city, etc.. By using both you can get a truly full picture. e.g, see how many blacks (compared absolutely and relatively with whites) have how much income, and then see in depth through interviews how it is to be a poor black person, a median income black person, and a rich black person. Same with racism, you can use data to approximate how many people experience racism, and then go deeper to see how it is to experience heavy racism, to experience light racism, no racism at all, or even ‘reverse’ racism (where people treat you better because of your race).
And I’d like to stress, that this is all still trivial inside a Bayesian framework (or even just a “commonsense” framework).
So let’s think of how we should respond to hearing one response in the survey. As Bayesians, before taking the anecdote at face value, we should consider what information it actually constitutes. We should consider the sample (black people who use the survey website), and ask how much should we trust the sample (or people in general, if there’s no reason to expect a relevant difference) to be honest, have good judgement, have good memory, and be equally likely to report both good and bad experiences. And then we should consider how surprising it is to hear a specific anecdote from someone in the sample. My point isn’t to answer any of these questions, but to point out that Bayes doesn’t allow you to just take the responses at face value, as standpoint epistemology may instruct you to do. if it does, it’s false, and if it doesn’t then it’s trivial.
This is treating this like a conflict and going to hear the other side before even checking how different the experience of black people is to white people (unless you base off your experience, which I guess standpoint epistemology would approve of). Not that I disapprove of learning about police officer’s experiences, but first make sure you have the experience of the first group situated correctly in the larger context.
To conclude, your post gives an extremely trivial account of “standpoint epistemology” (except the mention of “white people need to shut up and listen”) which makes me disagree with the framing more than the content (I downvoted for the framing, but were it missing I would probably upvote for the content). “Standpoint Epistemology” is either trivial, like it’s explained here, in which case the framing is bad and I suggest dropping it, or it’s non-trivial, in which case it should be judged on the merits of its non-trivial claims, which from what I’ve read and heard, I believe are entirely mistaken (I might explore this further in a followup comment).
And as this is LessWrong, perhaps a good final question is, would you want to code standpoint epistemology into an AGI? Either there’s something not contained in a bayes-like epistemology you would want it to do, in which case, what is it? Or it’s fully contained inside such an epistemology, in which case it’s too trivial for the framing.
it can also be evidence against what they’re saying, if you believe they’re more likely to say that in worlds where it’s false
Erisology is a very recently coined term, whereas the standard is to call it an epistemology. Also, as you point out, there are epistemological elements to it, and part of why I’m emphasizing the erisology angle is because I’ve been thinking of writing about a typology of erisologies that I have coined:
Mistake theory (disagreements originate in mistakes):
ability erisology: some people are smarter (or otherwise better) than others and this leads to disagreements between the informed and the uninformed
standpoint erisology: people have different experiences, leading to different beliefs, and if they cannot pool their info to come to a shared set of knowledge, then they end up persistently disagreeing
Conflict theory (disagreements originate in conflict):
battle erisology: some people represent concerns that are in tension with your concerns and they are trying to promote their concerns by spreading lies and interfering in communication
trauma erisology: different people have had different negative experiences that makes them avoid different sources of information, leading to them having different opinions due to their different sources of information
(Trauma erisology would be conflict theory because the “negative experiences” are usually related to conflict.)
“Sets up a motte and bailey” sounds like nonsense to me. Any time you mention multiple things, it is possible to ignore critiques of the less-defensible things and shift the discussion to the more-defensible claims.
If someone directly disagreed with the whole “white people need to shut up and listen” element, I wouldn’t deny that I’ve linked to that, and would instead engage with that area.
I’ve found it (or rather, theories adjacent to it which I learned before I got into this specific instantiation of it) to have profound implications for how I’ve been thinking about knowledge and evidence. 🤷 If you have already integrated the lessons for this, then maybe it is less profound to you.
It definitely has assumptions, but also you shouldn’t get distracted by the boilerplate. As long as we can agree that black people aren’t generally liars or crazy, we should expect there to be a ton of value in listening to their experiences.
I’ve definitely considered using these sorts of stories as inspirations for more rigid quantitative statistics. I didn’t get into this as part of this study because I didn’t have time to make it a huge comprehensive thing.
I agree that my study doesn’t very precisely determine how big of a problem it is, but I think it is still quite informative. Obviously how informative it is depends on what conclusions you want to draw, but I’ve laid the stories bare rather than abstracting them into any sorts of problematic conclusions.
There’s obvious tradeoffs in how well the police treat the black people they encounter vs how the police handle the black criminals they encounter, because the police do not necessarily know ahead of time who is criminal or not. Understanding what areas black people could get treated better versus what areas police face danger might help enlighten us on things like Pareto improvements to the treatment, or places where the treatment is inherently unfair to one side or the other.
It’s not clear to me how comparing the differences of the experience of black people to white people ends up working out. For all I know, white people’s experiences of the police might be “I haven’t interacted with the police”. (That’s my experience, but 1. I don’t live in the US, 2. I am 99.9% introversion, so my experience doesn’t necessarily generalize to Americans in general.)