3. Unnecessarily diluting the field’s epistemics by introducing too many naive or overly deferent viewpoints.
And later Claim 3 is:
Scholars might defer to their mentors and fail to critically analyze important assumptions, decreasing the average epistemic integrity of the field
It seems to me there might be two things being pointed to?
A) Unnecessary dilution: Via too many naive viewpoints; B) Excessive deference: Perhaps resulting in too few viewpoints or at least no new ones;
And arguably these two things are in tension, in the following sense: I think that to a significant extent, one of the sources of unnecessary dilution is the issue of less experienced people not learning directly from more experienced people and instead relying too heavily on other inexperienced peers to develop their research skills and tastes. i.e. you might say that A) is partly caused by insufficient deference.
I roughly think that that the downsides of de-emphasizing deference and the accumulation of factual knowledge from more experienced people are worse than keeping it as sort of the zeroth order/default thing to aim for. It seems to me that to the extent that one believes that the field is making any progress at all, one should think that increasingly there will be experienced people from whom less experienced people should expect—at least initially—to learn from/defer to.
Looking at it from the flipside, one of my feelings right now is that we need mentors who don’t buy too heavily into this idea that deference is somehow bad; I would love to see more mentors who can and want to actually teach people. (cf. The first main point—one that I agree with—that Richard Ngo made in his recent piece on advice: The area is mentorship constrained. )
Mentorship is critical to MATS. We generally haven’t accepted mentorless scholars because we believe that mentors’ accumulated knowledge is extremely useful for bootstrapping strong, original researchers.
Let me explain my chain of thought better:
A first-order failure mode would be “no one downloads experts’ models, and we grow a field of naive, overconfident takes.” In this scenario, we have maximized exploration at the cost of accumulated knowledge transmission (and probably useful originality, as novices might make the same basic mistakes). We patch this by creating a mechanism by which scholars are selected for their ability to download mentors’ models (and encouraged to do so).
A second-order failure mode would be “everyone downloads and defers to mentors’ models, and we grow a field of paradigm-locked, non-critical takes.” In this scenario, we have maximized the exploitation of existing paradigms at the cost of epistemic diversity or critical analysis. We patch this by creating mechanisms for scholars to critically examine their assumptions and debate with peers.
At the start you write
And later Claim 3 is:
It seems to me there might be two things being pointed to?
A) Unnecessary dilution: Via too many naive viewpoints;
B) Excessive deference: Perhaps resulting in too few viewpoints or at least no new ones;
And arguably these two things are in tension, in the following sense: I think that to a significant extent, one of the sources of unnecessary dilution is the issue of less experienced people not learning directly from more experienced people and instead relying too heavily on other inexperienced peers to develop their research skills and tastes. i.e. you might say that A) is partly caused by insufficient deference.
I roughly think that that the downsides of de-emphasizing deference and the accumulation of factual knowledge from more experienced people are worse than keeping it as sort of the zeroth order/default thing to aim for. It seems to me that to the extent that one believes that the field is making any progress at all, one should think that increasingly there will be experienced people from whom less experienced people should expect—at least initially—to learn from/defer to.
Looking at it from the flipside, one of my feelings right now is that we need mentors who don’t buy too heavily into this idea that deference is somehow bad; I would love to see more mentors who can and want to actually teach people. (cf. The first main point—one that I agree with—that Richard Ngo made in his recent piece on advice: The area is mentorship constrained. )
Mentorship is critical to MATS. We generally haven’t accepted mentorless scholars because we believe that mentors’ accumulated knowledge is extremely useful for bootstrapping strong, original researchers.
Let me explain my chain of thought better:
A first-order failure mode would be “no one downloads experts’ models, and we grow a field of naive, overconfident takes.” In this scenario, we have maximized exploration at the cost of accumulated knowledge transmission (and probably useful originality, as novices might make the same basic mistakes). We patch this by creating a mechanism by which scholars are selected for their ability to download mentors’ models (and encouraged to do so).
A second-order failure mode would be “everyone downloads and defers to mentors’ models, and we grow a field of paradigm-locked, non-critical takes.” In this scenario, we have maximized the exploitation of existing paradigms at the cost of epistemic diversity or critical analysis. We patch this by creating mechanisms for scholars to critically examine their assumptions and debate with peers.