David Hume is the first person who, the way I’m measuring things, was “basically right about nearly all the basics,” circa 1740, when his views were mostly minority opinions among elite education opinion. His basic views didn’t become majority elite opinion (again, in the way I’m carving things up) until, say, the 1910s. Was Hume justified in being quite confident of his views back in 1740?
I’m not actually asking you to answer: I’m betting neither of us knows enough about Hume or the details of the evidence and argument available to him and his peers to know. But it’s an interesting question. I lean non-confidently toward “yes, Hume was justified,” but that mostly just reveals my view about elite competence rather than arguing for it.
Information markets have become more efficient over time, and this has asymmetrically improved elite common sense relative to the views of outstanding individuals.
Even if Hume’s views were minority opinions, they may not have been flat out rejected by his peers (although they may have been). So the prior against his views being right coming from other people thinking other things may not be that strong.
Even if Hume wouldn’t have been justified in believing that the conjunction of all of his views is probably right, he could still have been justified in believing that each individual one is right with high probability.
I think that it’s sometimes possible to develop high (~95+%) confidence in views that run counter to elite conventional wisdom. This can sometimes be accomplished by investigating the relevant issues in sufficient detail and by using model combination, as long as one is sufficiently careful about checking that the models that one is using aren’t very dependent.
In the particular case of MWI, I doubt that Eliezer has arrived at his view via thorough investigation and by combining many independent models. In a response to Eliezer I highlighted a paper which gives a lot of references to papers criticizing MWI. As I wrote in my comment, I don’t think that it’s possible to have high confidence in MWI without reading and contemplating these criticisms.
This reminds me of this passage of Richard Rorty (could not link in a better way, sorry!). Rorty considers whether someone could ever be warranted in believing p against the best, thoughtfully considered opinion of the intellectual elites of his time. He answers:
Only if there was some way of determining warrant sub specie aeternitatis, some natural order of reasons that determines, quite apart from S’s ability to justify p to those around him, whether he is really justified in holding p.
Now, Rorty is a pragmatist sympathetic to postmodernism and cultural relativism (though without admitting explicitly to the latter), and for him the question is rhetorical and the answer is clearly “no”. From the LW point of view, it seems at first glance that the structure of Bayesian probability provides an objective “natural order of reasons” that allows an unequivocal answer. But digging deeper, the problem of the priors brings again the “relativist menace” of the title of Rorty’s essay. In practice, our priors come from our biology and our cultural upbringing; even our idealized constructs like Solomonoff induction are the priors that sound most reasonable to us given our best knowledge, that comes largely form our culture. If under considered reflection we decide that the best priors for existing humans involve the elite opinion of existing society, as the post suggests, it follows that Hume (or Copernicus or Einsten!1905 or…) could not be justified in going against that opinion, although they could be correct (and become justified as elites are convinced).
(Note: actually, Einstein might have been justified according to the sophisticated relativism of this post, if he had good reasons to believe that elite opinion would change when hearing his arguments—and he probably did, since the relevant elite opinion did change. But I doubt Hume and Copernicus could have been justified in the same way.)
A related question...
David Hume is the first person who, the way I’m measuring things, was “basically right about nearly all the basics,” circa 1740, when his views were mostly minority opinions among elite education opinion. His basic views didn’t become majority elite opinion (again, in the way I’m carving things up) until, say, the 1910s. Was Hume justified in being quite confident of his views back in 1740?
I’m not actually asking you to answer: I’m betting neither of us knows enough about Hume or the details of the evidence and argument available to him and his peers to know. But it’s an interesting question. I lean non-confidently toward “yes, Hume was justified,” but that mostly just reveals my view about elite competence rather than arguing for it.
Information markets have become more efficient over time, and this has asymmetrically improved elite common sense relative to the views of outstanding individuals.
Even if Hume’s views were minority opinions, they may not have been flat out rejected by his peers (although they may have been). So the prior against his views being right coming from other people thinking other things may not be that strong.
Even if Hume wouldn’t have been justified in believing that the conjunction of all of his views is probably right, he could still have been justified in believing that each individual one is right with high probability.
I think that it’s sometimes possible to develop high (~95+%) confidence in views that run counter to elite conventional wisdom. This can sometimes be accomplished by investigating the relevant issues in sufficient detail and by using model combination, as long as one is sufficiently careful about checking that the models that one is using aren’t very dependent.
In the particular case of MWI, I doubt that Eliezer has arrived at his view via thorough investigation and by combining many independent models. In a response to Eliezer I highlighted a paper which gives a lot of references to papers criticizing MWI. As I wrote in my comment, I don’t think that it’s possible to have high confidence in MWI without reading and contemplating these criticisms.
Somehow I had managed to not-think of #1. Thanks.
This reminds me of this passage of Richard Rorty (could not link in a better way, sorry!). Rorty considers whether someone could ever be warranted in believing p against the best, thoughtfully considered opinion of the intellectual elites of his time. He answers:
Now, Rorty is a pragmatist sympathetic to postmodernism and cultural relativism (though without admitting explicitly to the latter), and for him the question is rhetorical and the answer is clearly “no”. From the LW point of view, it seems at first glance that the structure of Bayesian probability provides an objective “natural order of reasons” that allows an unequivocal answer. But digging deeper, the problem of the priors brings again the “relativist menace” of the title of Rorty’s essay. In practice, our priors come from our biology and our cultural upbringing; even our idealized constructs like Solomonoff induction are the priors that sound most reasonable to us given our best knowledge, that comes largely form our culture. If under considered reflection we decide that the best priors for existing humans involve the elite opinion of existing society, as the post suggests, it follows that Hume (or Copernicus or Einsten!1905 or…) could not be justified in going against that opinion, although they could be correct (and become justified as elites are convinced).
(Note: actually, Einstein might have been justified according to the sophisticated relativism of this post, if he had good reasons to believe that elite opinion would change when hearing his arguments—and he probably did, since the relevant elite opinion did change. But I doubt Hume and Copernicus could have been justified in the same way.)