In a community where we try to assign status/esteem/respect based on epistemics, there’s always some risk that it will be hard to notice evidence of ingroup bias because we’ll so often be able to say “I’m not biased; I’m just correctly using evidence about track records to determine whose views to put more weight on”. I could see an argument for having more of a presumption of bias in order to correct for the fact that our culture makes it hard to spot particular instances of bias when they do occur. On the other hand, being too trigger-happy to yell “bias!” without concrete evidence can cause a lot of pointless arguments, and it’s easy to end up miscalibrated in the end.
I’d also want to explicitly warn against confusing epistemic motivations with ‘I want to make this social heuristic cheater-resistant’ motivations, since I think this is a common problem. Highly general arguments against the existence of hard-to-transmit evidence (or conflation of ‘has the claimant transmitted their evidence?’ with ‘is the claimant’s view reasonable?’) raise a lot of alarm bells for me in line with Status Regulation and Anxious Underconfidence and Hero Licensing.
I’d also want to explicitly warn against confusing epistemic motivations with ‘I want to make this social heuristic cheater-resistant’ motivations, since I think this is a common problem. Highly general arguments against the existence of hard-to-transmit evidence (or conflation of ‘has the claimant transmitted their evidence?’ with ‘is the claimant’s view reasonable?’) raise a lot of alarm bells for me in line with Status Regulation and Anxious Underconfidence and Hero Licensing.
Would it surprise you to know that I have issues with those posts as well?