For my own part: if hordes of people who aren’t really rationalists start adopting, for purely signaling reasons, the trappings of epistemic hygiene… if they start providing arguments in defense of their positions and admitting when those arguments are shown to be wrong, for example, not because of a genuine desire for the truth but merely because of a desire to be seen that way… if they start reliably articulating their biases and identifying the operation of biases in others, merely because that’s the social norm… if they start tagging their assertions with confidence indicators and using those indicators consistently without actually having a deep-rooted commitment to avoiding implicitly overstating or understating their confidence… and so on and so forth…
...well, actually, I’d pretty much call that an unadulterated win. Sign me up for that future, please.
OTOH, if hordes of people just start talking about how smart and rational they are and how that makes them better than ordinary people, well, that’s not worth much to me.
I suspect answers vary.
For my own part: if hordes of people who aren’t really rationalists start adopting, for purely signaling reasons, the trappings of epistemic hygiene… if they start providing arguments in defense of their positions and admitting when those arguments are shown to be wrong, for example, not because of a genuine desire for the truth but merely because of a desire to be seen that way… if they start reliably articulating their biases and identifying the operation of biases in others, merely because that’s the social norm… if they start tagging their assertions with confidence indicators and using those indicators consistently without actually having a deep-rooted commitment to avoiding implicitly overstating or understating their confidence… and so on and so forth…
...well, actually, I’d pretty much call that an unadulterated win. Sign me up for that future, please.
OTOH, if hordes of people just start talking about how smart and rational they are and how that makes them better than ordinary people, well, that’s not worth much to me.