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.)
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.)