I agree that intuitions might get you to high confidence without the ability to explain ideas legibly.
That said, I think expert intuitions still need to usually (always?) be grounded out in predictions about something (potentially including the many implicit predictions that are often required to do stuff). It seems to me like Eliezer is probably relying on a combination of:
Predicting stuff from afar. I think that can usually be made legible with a few years’ lead time. I’m sympathetic to the difficulty of doing this (despite my frequent snarky tone), though without doing it I think Eliezer himself should have more doubts about the possibility of hindsight bias if this is really his main source of evidence. In theory this could also be retrodictions about history which would make things more complicated in some ways but faster in others.
Testing intuitions against other already-trusted forms of reasoning, and particularly concrete arguments. In this regime, I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that Eliezer ought to be able to easily write down a convincing version of the arguments, but I do think we should expect him to systematically be right more often when we dig into arguments evaluated using those same already-trusted forms of reasoning. And so on this perspective it’s also quite useful to get into the argument.
I’m also sympathetic to Richard’s point as a more contingent claim about the nature of expert intuition on technical topics—there just aren’t many domains where you can get this much confidence out of intuitions you can’t explain more crisply than this. Though I wouldn’t be super confident about that, and (like you) I would mostly lean on the claim about collective epistemology if trying to push Eliezer to do something differently.
I agree that intuitions might get you to high confidence without the ability to explain ideas legibly.
That said, I think expert intuitions still need to usually (always?) be grounded out in predictions about something (potentially including the many implicit predictions that are often required to do stuff). It seems to me like Eliezer is probably relying on a combination of:
Predicting stuff from afar. I think that can usually be made legible with a few years’ lead time. I’m sympathetic to the difficulty of doing this (despite my frequent snarky tone), though without doing it I think Eliezer himself should have more doubts about the possibility of hindsight bias if this is really his main source of evidence. In theory this could also be retrodictions about history which would make things more complicated in some ways but faster in others.
Testing intuitions against other already-trusted forms of reasoning, and particularly concrete arguments. In this regime, I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that Eliezer ought to be able to easily write down a convincing version of the arguments, but I do think we should expect him to systematically be right more often when we dig into arguments evaluated using those same already-trusted forms of reasoning. And so on this perspective it’s also quite useful to get into the argument.
I’m also sympathetic to Richard’s point as a more contingent claim about the nature of expert intuition on technical topics—there just aren’t many domains where you can get this much confidence out of intuitions you can’t explain more crisply than this. Though I wouldn’t be super confident about that, and (like you) I would mostly lean on the claim about collective epistemology if trying to push Eliezer to do something differently.