Strong-upvote as well for the specificity request; the place where I most strongly expect attempts at “increasing standards” to fail is the point where people realize that broad agreement about direction does not necessarily translate to finer agreement about implementation, and I expect this is best avoided by sharing gears-level models as quickly and as early during the initial discussion as possible. As I wrote in another comment:
Finally, note that at no point have I made an attempt to define what, exactly, constitute “epistemic violations”, “epistemic standards”, or “epistemic hygiene”. This is because this is the point where I am least confident in my model of Duncan, and separately where I also think his argument is at its weakest. It seems plausible to me that, even if [something like] Duncan’s vision for LW were to be realized, there would be still be substantial remaining disagreement about how to evaluate certain edge cases, and that that lack of consensus could undermine the whole enterprise.
(Though my model of Duncan does interject in response to this, “It’s okay if the edge cases remain slightly blurry; those edge cases are not what matter in the vast majority of cases where I would identify a comment as being epistemically unvirtuous. What matters is that the central territory is firmed up, and right now LW is doing extremely poorly at picking even that low-hanging fruit.”)
((At which point I would step aside and ask the real Duncan what he thinks of that, and whether he thinks the examples he picked out from the Leverage and CFAR/MIRI threads constitute representative samples of what he would consider “central territory”.))
Strong-upvote as well for the specificity request; the place where I most strongly expect attempts at “increasing standards” to fail is the point where people realize that broad agreement about direction does not necessarily translate to finer agreement about implementation, and I expect this is best avoided by sharing gears-level models as quickly and as early during the initial discussion as possible. As I wrote in another comment: