On the issue of Critical Thinking, whilst it's true that for most people engaging with Critical Thinking the result is that they either begin to hold pretty crazy/outlandish beliefs or they use the stuff they learnt to unjustly reinforce their own beliefs by deflecting valid criticism in a manner that is superficially deep but mostly amounts to treating people extremely uncharitably.
There is still the question of how do you know which experts to defer to and how do you know if and when you should use your own judgment. The best way to illustrate the second issue is by presupposing that you are good at thinking or a Scott Alexander type, and figuring out what relevant fact out their in the world proves this to be true, you then realize that even people who aren't good at thinking would also be able to point to "things they also regard as such facts" and so how in principle would you be able to internally reason to the conclusion that you are better than average.
Even if you point to stuff such as your reputation on Metaculus or your fancy Harvard degree or your past 5 year performance on the stock market or your IQ or your training as a clairvoyant or the number of twitch followers you have or the fact you have a fields medal or the fact you are the pope or the fact that you were contacted by Jehovah 1 whilst watching late night television etc. How do you know which of these objective metrics is the correct way of determining if you are an expert or worthy of thinking for yourself, after all people who choose the wrong metric thought they chose the right metric.
It seems their really isn't a way to internally reason to the conclusion you are better at thinking than average, or at least the correct way of reasoning to such a conclusion wouldn't motivate people who are bad at thinking to either accept they are bad or good at thinking. As such you sort of have to take it for granted you are better than average if you think you are, you can also apply the same style of reasoning to which experts you defer to.
Definitely life's big conundrum, at least for people who actually bother to engage in critical thinking. If you have ever stopped to think about the probability of your own beliefs being wrong, you are obviously better than average.
I like to think that while we can't know if we are right or wrong, our goal doesn't need to be 100% accuracy. Being able to review our own beliefs skeptically and trying to imagine a world in which our views are wrong will improve the accuracy of our beliefs. No, we won't ever be able to get to 100% because we don't have perfect intelligence or access to perfect information. But if we can improve our accuracy by any amount then that's pretty great. I was personally disheartened when I realized that sometimes being smarter doesn't always make you better at having good beliefs. Some times it just lets you come up with better arguments for wrong beliefs.
I don't mean this to be condescending or paternalistic, but this post is surprisingly thoughtful and mature. For anyone, especially someone so young.
Just FYI, Scott is right about population. I know you are in the thrall of straight utilitarianism, like you were libertarianism before. It took me until my 50s to get out completely: https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
I've never really read Scott and expected him to be "right" 100% or even most of the time. But while I don't expect him to be able to tell me what to think, what is more impressive is how he thinks. He consistently approaches topics with the humble attitude of a truth seeker, and is upfront about his own opinions and biases when he does have them. He is also just a great writer -- that is why I read his blog. When I read his recent blogpost on the effects of prisons I never thought it was the be all end all, but it is still a good article.
> And yet… anyone who knows about population ethics, should recognize that this is an utter nonstarter implying. It implies tons of heinous nonsense—it’s just the person affecting view, which MacAskill tears to pieces.
You can't be wrong about a moral position or a preference. You can only be wrong about facts.
For whom does the summed utility of a larger population matter? Average utility matters for those experiencing it. Antinatalist population ethics is far more sophisticated than you give it justice for being. Better Never to Have Been/ The Human Predicament are not easily dismissed.
I think the meta question becomes how good you are at judging who to trust. Ironically one of my big disagreements with Scott is that he often gives credibility and benefit of the doubt to people I would not consider at all credible.
Regarding critical thinking, even if you choose to forego your own thinking and defer to experts, isn't that because you have critically thought about your own powers of thinking and research and come to the conclusion that it's best not to rely on them?
If that is a successful conclusion one reaches via critical thinking, who is to say there aren't others? So all these arguments against critical thinking seem to be self-undermining the way certain skeptical positions tend to be.
Also, doesn't Huemer hold views at odds with expert-consensus regarding global warming and climate change?
"If Scott will make sufficiently huge errors—and he’s the smartest person on the internet—then how many errors are being regularly made by media sources or books or journalists? The answer is a lot."
I'm not so sure about this. Sufficiently well-constructed intellectual environments should have some effect on limiting the type of errors Scott made in the article you referenced. e.g., presumably using the wrong statistical test, misspelling a name, and incorrectly claiming an article was retracted are errors that would likely be quickly found and fixed (as Scott himself did) in most good journals or newspapers. Although many of the individual people may be more prone to making these errors (because maybe they're not as smart as SA), the institutions they make up probably limit this quite a bit. Just a thought (obviously need to do the empirical research to see if this is right and how big this "institutional effect" might be on limiting mistakes like SA made)
So true. I considered writing a similar article myself. You are mostly making the point about pundits and authors, but I especially agree with you when it comes to experts. In the internet age it's very easy to find every single mistake that experts and institutions have made and point them out. This leads to declining trust in experts and institutions. But it's still obviously true that you will be healthier if you listen to the CDC's advice than if you listen to the advice of some random podcast. The CDC will get some things wrong, obviously. But they will get fewer things wrong than the influencer who has no real incentive (and likely is dis-incentivized) to put out accurate information. No one ever got fired from a podcast for making a bad prediction. Alex Jones shows us that telling really big lies can be incredibly lucrative.
I think another important piece of this puzzle has to do with probability and learning bad lessons from right actions. Say that you are playing blackjack and have 18. Obviously you should not hit. But if you choose not to hit and lose then people will point out that you lost so you must have made the wrong decision. Another person has 20 while the dealer also has 20. Clearly the right move is to accept the draw, but say you decide to hit and get an ace? Then everyone will praise your genius even though you made the worst possible choice and simply got lucky. This kind of thing happens a lot in life. We make decisions based on imperfect information and since we can't perform the same action thousands of times to see the probability of success, we learn the wrong lessons from good and bad outcomes. If you choose not to take expert advice and experience a good outcome you will assume that the experts are bullshit, even if you just got incredibly lucky.
Absolutely loved this article, thank you for being a voice of reason.
The Smartest Person In History was often egregiously wrong, about really flagship beliefs of his. The Theory of Forms is rubbish, there's no way of rescuing it from the third man problem (as Plato himself realised). Intellectual life is not best conducted as a sort of online league table according to who has, like, totally pwned whom on twitter. Also, I approve on personal grounds on exaggerated reverence for the holders of doctorates, but "x says in his PhD" adds nothing to "x says."
I agree with everything you say here, and think it all means that subject-matter experts should try to do more communication aimed at general-but-educated audiences.
On the issue of Critical Thinking, whilst it's true that for most people engaging with Critical Thinking the result is that they either begin to hold pretty crazy/outlandish beliefs or they use the stuff they learnt to unjustly reinforce their own beliefs by deflecting valid criticism in a manner that is superficially deep but mostly amounts to treating people extremely uncharitably.
There is still the question of how do you know which experts to defer to and how do you know if and when you should use your own judgment. The best way to illustrate the second issue is by presupposing that you are good at thinking or a Scott Alexander type, and figuring out what relevant fact out their in the world proves this to be true, you then realize that even people who aren't good at thinking would also be able to point to "things they also regard as such facts" and so how in principle would you be able to internally reason to the conclusion that you are better than average.
Even if you point to stuff such as your reputation on Metaculus or your fancy Harvard degree or your past 5 year performance on the stock market or your IQ or your training as a clairvoyant or the number of twitch followers you have or the fact you have a fields medal or the fact you are the pope or the fact that you were contacted by Jehovah 1 whilst watching late night television etc. How do you know which of these objective metrics is the correct way of determining if you are an expert or worthy of thinking for yourself, after all people who choose the wrong metric thought they chose the right metric.
It seems their really isn't a way to internally reason to the conclusion you are better at thinking than average, or at least the correct way of reasoning to such a conclusion wouldn't motivate people who are bad at thinking to either accept they are bad or good at thinking. As such you sort of have to take it for granted you are better than average if you think you are, you can also apply the same style of reasoning to which experts you defer to.
Definitely life's big conundrum, at least for people who actually bother to engage in critical thinking. If you have ever stopped to think about the probability of your own beliefs being wrong, you are obviously better than average.
I like to think that while we can't know if we are right or wrong, our goal doesn't need to be 100% accuracy. Being able to review our own beliefs skeptically and trying to imagine a world in which our views are wrong will improve the accuracy of our beliefs. No, we won't ever be able to get to 100% because we don't have perfect intelligence or access to perfect information. But if we can improve our accuracy by any amount then that's pretty great. I was personally disheartened when I realized that sometimes being smarter doesn't always make you better at having good beliefs. Some times it just lets you come up with better arguments for wrong beliefs.
It’s remarkable how much my beliefs have changed in the past year, I have really come to appreciate the value of epistemic humility.
Amusingly, Scott has an old blog post about exactly this issue: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/26/rule-genius-in-not-out/
I don't mean this to be condescending or paternalistic, but this post is surprisingly thoughtful and mature. For anyone, especially someone so young.
Just FYI, Scott is right about population. I know you are in the thrall of straight utilitarianism, like you were libertarianism before. It took me until my 50s to get out completely: https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
I've never really read Scott and expected him to be "right" 100% or even most of the time. But while I don't expect him to be able to tell me what to think, what is more impressive is how he thinks. He consistently approaches topics with the humble attitude of a truth seeker, and is upfront about his own opinions and biases when he does have them. He is also just a great writer -- that is why I read his blog. When I read his recent blogpost on the effects of prisons I never thought it was the be all end all, but it is still a good article.
My submission for the smartest person on the internet:
Terry Tao [https://terrytao.wordpress.com/]
My submission for the smartest person on the internet...no, modesty prevents me from continuing.
I am sure even Terry has made mistakes on his blog!
> And yet… anyone who knows about population ethics, should recognize that this is an utter nonstarter implying. It implies tons of heinous nonsense—it’s just the person affecting view, which MacAskill tears to pieces.
You can't be wrong about a moral position or a preference. You can only be wrong about facts.
(But who does Scott Alexander defer to?)
If the people we defer to are as humble as you are here, it undermines their authority.
"Here's how it is. Oh but I could aways be wrong." Gives with one hand, takes with the other.
For whom does the summed utility of a larger population matter? Average utility matters for those experiencing it. Antinatalist population ethics is far more sophisticated than you give it justice for being. Better Never to Have Been/ The Human Predicament are not easily dismissed.
It matters for the people experiencing it. It matters for them when they experience it. If you want a deeper dive, see here. https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-worlds-most-dangerous-population
Even Chalmers did not bite the bullet in either direction.
I think the meta question becomes how good you are at judging who to trust. Ironically one of my big disagreements with Scott is that he often gives credibility and benefit of the doubt to people I would not consider at all credible.
Regarding critical thinking, even if you choose to forego your own thinking and defer to experts, isn't that because you have critically thought about your own powers of thinking and research and come to the conclusion that it's best not to rely on them?
If that is a successful conclusion one reaches via critical thinking, who is to say there aren't others? So all these arguments against critical thinking seem to be self-undermining the way certain skeptical positions tend to be.
Also, doesn't Huemer hold views at odds with expert-consensus regarding global warming and climate change?
"If Scott will make sufficiently huge errors—and he’s the smartest person on the internet—then how many errors are being regularly made by media sources or books or journalists? The answer is a lot."
I'm not so sure about this. Sufficiently well-constructed intellectual environments should have some effect on limiting the type of errors Scott made in the article you referenced. e.g., presumably using the wrong statistical test, misspelling a name, and incorrectly claiming an article was retracted are errors that would likely be quickly found and fixed (as Scott himself did) in most good journals or newspapers. Although many of the individual people may be more prone to making these errors (because maybe they're not as smart as SA), the institutions they make up probably limit this quite a bit. Just a thought (obviously need to do the empirical research to see if this is right and how big this "institutional effect" might be on limiting mistakes like SA made)
So true. I considered writing a similar article myself. You are mostly making the point about pundits and authors, but I especially agree with you when it comes to experts. In the internet age it's very easy to find every single mistake that experts and institutions have made and point them out. This leads to declining trust in experts and institutions. But it's still obviously true that you will be healthier if you listen to the CDC's advice than if you listen to the advice of some random podcast. The CDC will get some things wrong, obviously. But they will get fewer things wrong than the influencer who has no real incentive (and likely is dis-incentivized) to put out accurate information. No one ever got fired from a podcast for making a bad prediction. Alex Jones shows us that telling really big lies can be incredibly lucrative.
I think another important piece of this puzzle has to do with probability and learning bad lessons from right actions. Say that you are playing blackjack and have 18. Obviously you should not hit. But if you choose not to hit and lose then people will point out that you lost so you must have made the wrong decision. Another person has 20 while the dealer also has 20. Clearly the right move is to accept the draw, but say you decide to hit and get an ace? Then everyone will praise your genius even though you made the worst possible choice and simply got lucky. This kind of thing happens a lot in life. We make decisions based on imperfect information and since we can't perform the same action thousands of times to see the probability of success, we learn the wrong lessons from good and bad outcomes. If you choose not to take expert advice and experience a good outcome you will assume that the experts are bullshit, even if you just got incredibly lucky.
Absolutely loved this article, thank you for being a voice of reason.
The Smartest Person In History was often egregiously wrong, about really flagship beliefs of his. The Theory of Forms is rubbish, there's no way of rescuing it from the third man problem (as Plato himself realised). Intellectual life is not best conducted as a sort of online league table according to who has, like, totally pwned whom on twitter. Also, I approve on personal grounds on exaggerated reverence for the holders of doctorates, but "x says in his PhD" adds nothing to "x says."
Parrhesia link doesn't work.
I agree with everything you say here, and think it all means that subject-matter experts should try to do more communication aimed at general-but-educated audiences.
This post is about as a GOAT as Scott Alexander.
Wait, Scott Alexander is the smartest person on the Internet? He's written before about his painful, uphill struggles with calculus.
Don't misread me, here; Scott is a great writer, but there are a lot of people on the Internet.