It sounds like you’re saying that at MIRI, you approximate a potential hire’s philosophical competence by checking to see how much they agree with you on philosophy. That doesn’t seem great for group epistemics?
I did not mean to imply that MIRI does this any more than e.g. philosophy academia.
When you don’t have sufficient objective things to use to judge competence, you end up having to use agreement as a proxy for competence. This is because when you understand a mistake, you can filter for people who do not make that mistake, but when you do not understand a mistake you are making, it is hard to filter for people that do not make that mistake.
Sometimes, you interact with someone who disagrees with you, and you talk to them, and you learn that you were making a mistake that they did not make, and this is a very good sign for competence, but you can only really get this positive signal about as often as you change your mind, which isn’t often.
Sometimes, you can also disagree with someone, and see that their position is internally consistent, which is another way you can observe some competence without agreement.
I think that personally, I use a proxy that is something like “How much do I feel like I learn(/like where my mind goes) when I am talking to the person,” which I think selects for some philosophical agreement (their concepts are not so far from my own that I can’t translate), but also some philosophical disagreement (their concepts are better than my own at making at least one thing less confusing). (This condition does not feel necessary for me. I feel like having a coherent plan is also a great sign, even if I do not feel like I learn when I am talking to the person.)
I did not mean to imply that MIRI does this any more than e.g. philosophy academia.
When you don’t have sufficient objective things to use to judge competence, you end up having to use agreement as a proxy for competence. This is because when you understand a mistake, you can filter for people who do not make that mistake, but when you do not understand a mistake you are making, it is hard to filter for people that do not make that mistake.
Sometimes, you interact with someone who disagrees with you, and you talk to them, and you learn that you were making a mistake that they did not make, and this is a very good sign for competence, but you can only really get this positive signal about as often as you change your mind, which isn’t often.
Sometimes, you can also disagree with someone, and see that their position is internally consistent, which is another way you can observe some competence without agreement.
I think that personally, I use a proxy that is something like “How much do I feel like I learn(/like where my mind goes) when I am talking to the person,” which I think selects for some philosophical agreement (their concepts are not so far from my own that I can’t translate), but also some philosophical disagreement (their concepts are better than my own at making at least one thing less confusing). (This condition does not feel necessary for me. I feel like having a coherent plan is also a great sign, even if I do not feel like I learn when I am talking to the person.)