Cool—that makes sense. In principle, would you still count everyone with some (possibly very small) weight, the way PageRank does? (Or maybe negative weight in a few cases.) A binary separation between elites and non-elites seems hacky, though of course, it may in fact be best to do so in practice to make the analysis tractable. Cutting out part of the sample also leads to a biased estimator, but maybe that’s not such a big deal in most cases if the weight on the remaining part was small anyway. You could also give different weight among the elites. Basically, elites vs. non-elites is a binary approximation of a more continuous weighting distribution. Anyway, it may be misleading to think of this as purely a weighted sample of opinion, because (a) you want to reduce the weight of beliefs that are copied from each other and (b) you may want to harmonize the beliefs in a way that’s different from blind averaging. Also, as you suggested, (c) you may want to dampen outliers to avoid pulling the average too much toward the outlier.
This sounds roughly right to me. Note that there’s are two different things you really want to know about people:
(1) What they believe on the matter;
(2) Who they think is trustworthy on the matter.
Often it seems that (2) is more important, even when you’re looking at people who are deemed trustworthy. If I have a question about lung disease, most people will not have much idea to (1), and recommend doctors for (2). Most doctors will have some idea, and recommend specialists for (2). Specialists are likely to have a pretty good idea for (1), and recommend the top people in their field for (2). These are the people you really want to listen to for (1), if you can, but regular people would not tend to know who they were.
I’m not sure exactly how you should be weighting (1) against (2), but the principle of using both, and following through chains to at least some degree, feels natural.
Yeah, it’s hard to say whether the weights would be negative. As an extreme case, if there was someone who wanted to cause as much suffering as possible, then if that person was really smart, we might gain insight into how to reduce suffering by flipping around the policies he advocated. If someone wants you to get a perfect zero score on a binary multiple-choice test, you can get a perfect score by flipping the answers. These cases are rare, though. Even the hypothetical suffering maximizer still has many correct beliefs, e.g., that you need to breathe air to stay alive.
I agree that in principle, you don’t want some discontinuous distinction between elites and non-elites. I also agree with your points (a) - (c). Something like PageRank seems good to me, though of course I would want to be tentative about the details.
In practice, my suspicion is that most of what’s relevant here comes from the very elite people’s thinking, so that not much is lost by just focusing on their opinions. But I hold this view pretty tentatively. I presented the ideas the way I did partly because of this hunch and partly for ease of exposition.
Nick, what do you do about the Pope getting extremely high PageRank by your measure? You could say that most people who trust his judgment aren’t elites themselves, but some certainly are (e.g., heads of state, CEOs, celebrities). Every president in US history has given very high credence to the moral teachings of Jesus, and some have even given high credence to his factual teachings. Hitler had very high PageRank during the 1930s, though I guess he doesn’t now, and you could say that any algorithm makes mistakes some of the time.
ETA: I guess you did say in your post that we should be less reliant on elite common sense in areas like religion and politics where rationality is less prized. But I feel like a similar thing could be said to some extent of debates about moral conclusions. The cleanest area of application for elite common-sense is with respect to verifiable factual claims.
I don’t have a lot to add to my comments on religious authorities, apart from what I said in the post and what I said in response to Luke’s Muslim theology case here.
One thing I’d say is that many of the Christian moral teachings that are most celebrated are actually pretty good, though I’d admit that many others are not. Examples of good ones include:
Love your neighbor as yourself (I’d translate this as “treat others as you would like to be treated”)
Focus on identifying and managing your own personal weaknesses rather than criticizing others for their weaknesses
Prioritize helping poor and disenfranchised people
Don’t let your acts of charity be motivated by finding approval from others
These are all drawn from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, which is arguably his most celebrated set of moral teachings.
Good points. Of course, depending on the Pope in question, you also have teachings like the sinfulness of homosexuality, the evil of birth control, and the righteousness of God in torturing nonbelievers forever. Many people place more weight on these beliefs than they do on those of liberal/scientific elites.
It seems like you’re going to get clusters of authority sentiment. Educated people will place high authority on impressive intellectuals, business people, etc. Conservative religious people will tend to place high authority on church leaders, religious founders, etc. and very low authority on scientists, at least when it comes to metaphysical questions rather than what medicine to take for an ailment. (Though there are plenty of skeptics of traditional medicine too.) What makes the world of Catholic elites different from the world of scientific elites? I mean, some people think the Pope is a stronger authority on God than anyone thinks the smartest scientist is about physics.
Cool—that makes sense. In principle, would you still count everyone with some (possibly very small) weight, the way PageRank does? (Or maybe negative weight in a few cases.) A binary separation between elites and non-elites seems hacky, though of course, it may in fact be best to do so in practice to make the analysis tractable. Cutting out part of the sample also leads to a biased estimator, but maybe that’s not such a big deal in most cases if the weight on the remaining part was small anyway. You could also give different weight among the elites. Basically, elites vs. non-elites is a binary approximation of a more continuous weighting distribution. Anyway, it may be misleading to think of this as purely a weighted sample of opinion, because (a) you want to reduce the weight of beliefs that are copied from each other and (b) you may want to harmonize the beliefs in a way that’s different from blind averaging. Also, as you suggested, (c) you may want to dampen outliers to avoid pulling the average too much toward the outlier.
This sounds roughly right to me. Note that there’s are two different things you really want to know about people:
(1) What they believe on the matter;
(2) Who they think is trustworthy on the matter.
Often it seems that (2) is more important, even when you’re looking at people who are deemed trustworthy. If I have a question about lung disease, most people will not have much idea to (1), and recommend doctors for (2). Most doctors will have some idea, and recommend specialists for (2). Specialists are likely to have a pretty good idea for (1), and recommend the top people in their field for (2). These are the people you really want to listen to for (1), if you can, but regular people would not tend to know who they were.
I’m not sure exactly how you should be weighting (1) against (2), but the principle of using both, and following through chains to at least some degree, feels natural.
Probably not.
Yeah, it’s hard to say whether the weights would be negative. As an extreme case, if there was someone who wanted to cause as much suffering as possible, then if that person was really smart, we might gain insight into how to reduce suffering by flipping around the policies he advocated. If someone wants you to get a perfect zero score on a binary multiple-choice test, you can get a perfect score by flipping the answers. These cases are rare, though. Even the hypothetical suffering maximizer still has many correct beliefs, e.g., that you need to breathe air to stay alive.
I agree that in principle, you don’t want some discontinuous distinction between elites and non-elites. I also agree with your points (a) - (c). Something like PageRank seems good to me, though of course I would want to be tentative about the details.
In practice, my suspicion is that most of what’s relevant here comes from the very elite people’s thinking, so that not much is lost by just focusing on their opinions. But I hold this view pretty tentatively. I presented the ideas the way I did partly because of this hunch and partly for ease of exposition.
Nick, what do you do about the Pope getting extremely high PageRank by your measure? You could say that most people who trust his judgment aren’t elites themselves, but some certainly are (e.g., heads of state, CEOs, celebrities). Every president in US history has given very high credence to the moral teachings of Jesus, and some have even given high credence to his factual teachings. Hitler had very high PageRank during the 1930s, though I guess he doesn’t now, and you could say that any algorithm makes mistakes some of the time.
ETA: I guess you did say in your post that we should be less reliant on elite common sense in areas like religion and politics where rationality is less prized. But I feel like a similar thing could be said to some extent of debates about moral conclusions. The cleanest area of application for elite common-sense is with respect to verifiable factual claims.
I don’t have a lot to add to my comments on religious authorities, apart from what I said in the post and what I said in response to Luke’s Muslim theology case here.
One thing I’d say is that many of the Christian moral teachings that are most celebrated are actually pretty good, though I’d admit that many others are not. Examples of good ones include:
Love your neighbor as yourself (I’d translate this as “treat others as you would like to be treated”)
Focus on identifying and managing your own personal weaknesses rather than criticizing others for their weaknesses
Prioritize helping poor and disenfranchised people
Don’t let your acts of charity be motivated by finding approval from others
These are all drawn from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, which is arguably his most celebrated set of moral teachings.
Good points. Of course, depending on the Pope in question, you also have teachings like the sinfulness of homosexuality, the evil of birth control, and the righteousness of God in torturing nonbelievers forever. Many people place more weight on these beliefs than they do on those of liberal/scientific elites.
It seems like you’re going to get clusters of authority sentiment. Educated people will place high authority on impressive intellectuals, business people, etc. Conservative religious people will tend to place high authority on church leaders, religious founders, etc. and very low authority on scientists, at least when it comes to metaphysical questions rather than what medicine to take for an ailment. (Though there are plenty of skeptics of traditional medicine too.) What makes the world of Catholic elites different from the world of scientific elites? I mean, some people think the Pope is a stronger authority on God than anyone thinks the smartest scientist is about physics.