I appreciate you raising this issue, Evan. And especially the clarity of the trade off between instrumental and epistemic rationality brings into focus a sense of discomfort I have felt in a lot of the recent activity on LW critical of the CDC.
I think it’s especially important to keep our egos small and remember that expertise does not generalise.
To me it also brings home the difficulty of working out if “experts” are really expert. Or if a given organization is optimized to deliver the benefits of expertise. Many times I have been seriously harmed by ‘experts’ who didn’t know what they were doing.
One indication: The CDC been subject to some trenchant criticism from medical people.
Another: Their problems seem not to be so much in highly technical issues but basic organisational failures.
<Maybe it is better not to speak the truth> pseudo-quote
The long term costs of past lying, or even of signaling that you would lie in certain circumstances, can be very severe. Consider the fact that people are by now basically discounting everything the CCP says to zero. Even when they tell the truth, they are not able to transmit that information to people because we assume they are lying.
I appreciate you raising this issue, Evan. And especially the clarity of the trade off between instrumental and epistemic rationality brings into focus a sense of discomfort I have felt in a lot of the recent activity on LW critical of the CDC.
I think it’s especially important to keep our egos small and remember that expertise does not generalise.
To me it also brings home the difficulty of working out if “experts” are really expert. Or if a given organization is optimized to deliver the benefits of expertise. Many times I have been seriously harmed by ‘experts’ who didn’t know what they were doing.
One indication: The CDC been subject to some trenchant criticism from medical people.
Another: Their problems seem not to be so much in highly technical issues but basic organisational failures.
The long term costs of past lying, or even of signaling that you would lie in certain circumstances, can be very severe. Consider the fact that people are by now basically discounting everything the CCP says to zero. Even when they tell the truth, they are not able to transmit that information to people because we assume they are lying.