EA - In defence of epistemic modesty [distillation] by Luise

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: In defence of epistemic modesty [distillation], published by Luise on May 10, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is a distillation of In defence of epistemic modesty, a 2017 essay by Gregory Lewis. I hope to make the essay’s key points accessible in a quick and easy way so more people engage with them. I thank Gregory Lewis for helpful comments on an earlier version of this post. Errors are my own.Note: I sometimes use the first person (“I claim”/”I think”) in this post. This felt most natural but is not meant to imply any of the ideas or arguments are mine. Unless I clearly state otherwise, they are Gregory Lewis’s.What I CutI had to make some judgment calls on what is essential and what isn’t. Among other things, I decided most math and toy models weren’t essential. Moreover, I cut the details on the “self-defeating” objection, which felt quite philosophical and probably not relevant to most readers. Furthermore, it will be most useful to treat all the arguments brought up in this distillation as mere introductions, while detailed/conclusive arguments may be found in the original post and the literature.ClaimsI claim two things:You should practice strong epistemic modesty: On a given issue, adopt the view experts generally hold, instead of the view you personally like.EAs/rationalists in particular are too epistemically immodest.Let’s first dive deeper into claim 1.Claim 1: Strong Epistemic ModestyTo distinguish the view you personally like from the view strong epistemic modesty favors, call the former “view by your own lights” and the latter “view all things considered”.In detail, strong epistemic modesty says you should do the following to form your view on an issue:Determine the ‘epistemic virtue’ of people who hold a view on the issue. By ‘epistemic virtue’ I mean someone’s ability to form accurate beliefs, including how much the person knows about the issue, their intelligence, how truth-seeking they are, etc.Determine what everyone's credences by their own lights are.Take an average of everyone’s credences by their own lights (including yourself), weighting them by their epistemic virtue.The product is your view all things considered. Importantly, this process weighs your credences by your own lights no more heavily than those of people with similar epistemic virtue. These people are your ‘epistemic peers’.In practice, you can round this process to “use the existing consensus of experts on the issue or, if there is none, be uncertain”.Why?Intuition PumpSay your mom is convinced she’s figured out the one weird trick to make money on the stock market. You are concerned about the validity of this one weird trick, because of two worries:Does she have a better chance at making money than all the other people with similar (low) amounts of knowledge on the stock market who’re all also convinced they know the one weird trick? (These are her epistemic peers.)How do her odds of making money stack up against people working full-time at a hedge fund with lots of relevant background and access to heavy analysis? (These are the experts.)The point is that we are all sometimes like the mom in this example. We’re overconfident, forgetting that we are no better than our epistemic peers, be the question investing, sports bets, musical taste, or politics. Everyone always thinks they are an exception and have figured [investing/sports/politics] out. It’s our epistemic peers that are wrong! But from their perspective, we look just as foolish and misguided as they look to us.Not only do we treat our epistemic peers incorrectly, but also our epistemic superiors. The mom in this example didn’t seek out the expert consensus on making money on the stock market (maybe something like “use algorithms” and “you don’t stand a chance”). Instead, she may have li...