It’s complicated. On one hand, there are good reasons to resist Goodharting. On the other hand, it is convenient to defend the existing hierarchies, if you happen to be on the top. Just because the status quo is convenient for high-status people, doesn’t mean that the worries about Goodharting should be dismissed. Then again, maybe in some situations the Goodharting could be avoided by making better tests, and yes it is likely that the high-status people would resist that, too.
I guess this needs to be examined case by case. Even obviously bad things like the number of patients dying… we need to be careful whether the alternative is not something like turning the most sick patients away (so that they die at home, or in a competing hospital, in a way that does not hurt our statistics) or denying euthanasia to the terminally ill, which the metric would incentivize.
The issue with intellectuals and rationalists is that high IQ does not necessarily imply expertise or rationality. It may be a necessary condition, but is far from sufficient. Many highly intelligent people believe in various conspiracy theories. (This is further complicated by the fact that some highly intelligent people signal their intelligence by believing in weird things, in a way that does not positively correlate “weird” with “true”.)
It might make sense to reject people based on IQ, for example to make a web forum where only people with IQ 130 or more are allowed to post. But there would still be many crackpots and politically mindkilled people who pass this bar, so you would still need to filter them by something else. (In which case it makes sense to avoid the controversy and drop the IQ bar, and just filter them by their apparent expertise or rationality.)
(Basically, the entire idea of Mensa was filtering by high IQ, and it is considered a failure by many.)
That said, it might be good to make some public tests of expertise at various things; ideally tests that directly measure “how much you understand this” without simultaneously measuring “how much money and time are you willing to waste in order to get certified that you understand this”, and make such certificate a requirement for participating in some debates. Preferably make the test relatively simple (like, one or two sigma), so that it is a positive filter (“this person understands the basics of the topic they are discussing”) rather than a negative filter (“this person got all the obscure details right”), so that the ignorant are filtered away, but educated people are not censored because of a trick question that you can get right by learning to the test rather than learning the topic in general. We would also need to make sure that people are not measuring political compliance instead of knowledge of the topic in general.
It’s complicated. On one hand, there are good reasons to resist Goodharting. On the other hand, it is convenient to defend the existing hierarchies, if you happen to be on the top. Just because the status quo is convenient for high-status people, doesn’t mean that the worries about Goodharting should be dismissed. Then again, maybe in some situations the Goodharting could be avoided by making better tests, and yes it is likely that the high-status people would resist that, too.
I guess this needs to be examined case by case. Even obviously bad things like the number of patients dying… we need to be careful whether the alternative is not something like turning the most sick patients away (so that they die at home, or in a competing hospital, in a way that does not hurt our statistics) or denying euthanasia to the terminally ill, which the metric would incentivize.
The issue with intellectuals and rationalists is that high IQ does not necessarily imply expertise or rationality. It may be a necessary condition, but is far from sufficient. Many highly intelligent people believe in various conspiracy theories. (This is further complicated by the fact that some highly intelligent people signal their intelligence by believing in weird things, in a way that does not positively correlate “weird” with “true”.)
It might make sense to reject people based on IQ, for example to make a web forum where only people with IQ 130 or more are allowed to post. But there would still be many crackpots and politically mindkilled people who pass this bar, so you would still need to filter them by something else. (In which case it makes sense to avoid the controversy and drop the IQ bar, and just filter them by their apparent expertise or rationality.)
(Basically, the entire idea of Mensa was filtering by high IQ, and it is considered a failure by many.)
That said, it might be good to make some public tests of expertise at various things; ideally tests that directly measure “how much you understand this” without simultaneously measuring “how much money and time are you willing to waste in order to get certified that you understand this”, and make such certificate a requirement for participating in some debates. Preferably make the test relatively simple (like, one or two sigma), so that it is a positive filter (“this person understands the basics of the topic they are discussing”) rather than a negative filter (“this person got all the obscure details right”), so that the ignorant are filtered away, but educated people are not censored because of a trick question that you can get right by learning to the test rather than learning the topic in general. We would also need to make sure that people are not measuring political compliance instead of knowledge of the topic in general.