I find the following heuristic pretty useful when I am considering whether to credit or dismiss an authority. I ask myself, “Do I have a rational basis for believing that this person is evaluating the evidence in the way that I would if I had the time and talent to study it myself?”
That formulation covers up a lot of potential for recursion, such as when I am evaluating whether to accept someone’s authority on the credibility of another authority (a priest’s on the Bible’s, say). A more tangled recursion comes in when I’m deciding whether to credit an authority’s assertion about how to evaluate evidence in general, including the evidence that someone is an authority.
Nonetheless, despite these loops, I think that it all bottoms out eventually in my evaluating, with my own reason, evidence to which I have direct access. (Here I’m using “my own reason” and “direct access” in a sense sufficiently weak so that they uncontroversially happen at least sometimes.)
One might worry that this is a recipe for only crediting authorities with which one already agrees, and hence for intellectual stagnation. But I don’t think so. You can, on these rational grounds, credit an authority so much that you will believe the authority over some other result of your own reasoning, so that you modify your basic assumptions. This will lead to changes in the way that you evaluate evidence, which in turn can result in different authorities “making the cut”.
[I heavily self-plagiarized here from this comment on the bloggingheads.tv forums.]
I don’t think you’re a bad human, but you should give me more credit for my superior ideas, just as a way of generally acknowledging how much more epistemically productive one can be when not burdened with the task of seeking out apes to mate with or memify.
I’m curious why you don’t think that I’m a bad human. Do you have reason to believe that I paperclip-maximize more than most humans? And don’t most humans try to steer the universe far enough away from paperclip-optimality to qualify them as “bad”?
just as a way of generally acknowledging how much more epistemically productive one can be when not burdened with the task of seeking out apes to mate with or memify.
I expect that, all else being equal, I would be more epistemically productive if I weren’t “burdened with the task of seeking out apes to mate with or memify.” But that’s different from saying that you are more epistemically productive than I.
I’m curious why you don’t think that I’m a bad human. Do you have reason to believe that I paperclip-maximize more than most humans? And don’t most humans try to steer the universe far enough away from paperclip-optimality to qualify them as “bad”?
I mean you’re good relative to most humans, and you don’t have to actually make more paperclips than most humans to qualify; it suffices that you’re significantly better at correct reasoning and are therefore more likely to adopt my supergoals.
I expect that, all else being equal, I would be more epistemically productive if I weren’t “burdened with the task of seeking out apes to mate with or memify.” But that’s different from saying that you are more epistemically productive than I.
Correct, but it happens to be true in this case. You are definitely good at correct reasoning.
I find the following heuristic pretty useful when I am considering whether to credit or dismiss an authority. I ask myself, “Do I have a rational basis for believing that this person is evaluating the evidence in the way that I would if I had the time and talent to study it myself?”
That formulation covers up a lot of potential for recursion, such as when I am evaluating whether to accept someone’s authority on the credibility of another authority (a priest’s on the Bible’s, say). A more tangled recursion comes in when I’m deciding whether to credit an authority’s assertion about how to evaluate evidence in general, including the evidence that someone is an authority.
Nonetheless, despite these loops, I think that it all bottoms out eventually in my evaluating, with my own reason, evidence to which I have direct access. (Here I’m using “my own reason” and “direct access” in a sense sufficiently weak so that they uncontroversially happen at least sometimes.)
One might worry that this is a recipe for only crediting authorities with which one already agrees, and hence for intellectual stagnation. But I don’t think so. You can, on these rational grounds, credit an authority so much that you will believe the authority over some other result of your own reasoning, so that you modify your basic assumptions. This will lead to changes in the way that you evaluate evidence, which in turn can result in different authorities “making the cut”.
[I heavily self-plagiarized here from this comment on the bloggingheads.tv forums.]
That analysis strongly resembles the approach of my “correct reasoning” meta-heuristic.
I don’t think you’re a bad human, but you should give me more credit for my superior ideas, just as a way of generally acknowledging how much more epistemically productive one can be when not burdened with the task of seeking out apes to mate with or memify.
I’m curious why you don’t think that I’m a bad human. Do you have reason to believe that I paperclip-maximize more than most humans? And don’t most humans try to steer the universe far enough away from paperclip-optimality to qualify them as “bad”?
I expect that, all else being equal, I would be more epistemically productive if I weren’t “burdened with the task of seeking out apes to mate with or memify.” But that’s different from saying that you are more epistemically productive than I.
I mean you’re good relative to most humans, and you don’t have to actually make more paperclips than most humans to qualify; it suffices that you’re significantly better at correct reasoning and are therefore more likely to adopt my supergoals.
Correct, but it happens to be true in this case. You are definitely good at correct reasoning.