When I heard this, I was simply confused at how unexamined Matt’s position was.
The idea of being an expert on ethics is something the Rationalist is community quite familiar with. Effective Altruism, in general, assumes that an EA mode of moral behavior is in fact something one can develop an expertise in. Perhaps you have different values than EA, but even so, whatever your values, there can be more or less effective ways of achieving them, an expert is just someone who has mapped the tensions and conflicts and contradictions involved in thinking about the territory clearly.
It seems to me that there are many different complaints being raised:
A) Experts in specific things were treated as general authorities.
A lot of what we get is adjacent expertise. So somebody who studies viruses, and maybe knows a lot about the protein structure of viruses, will opine about masks, right… They didn’t have expertise in those areas, and were in fact just on a par with me, or anybody else, right? But they had the, sometimes, arrogance that comes with believing you’re being asked about your area of expertise.
B) People have differing moral values about what is a good result.
We’re just talking about, what is a fair and reasonable way to prioritize different people over each other?
C) The arguments and decisions being made aren’t actually being made by the real experts, they are being made by pseudo-experts.
And I’m like, “Well, according to whom?” Right? Obviously in consequentialist terms, it’s good ethics. I happened to know the top expert in Kantian ethics, she thinks that’s a good idea. So, who the fuck are you?
I think these complaints are not incompatible with some people being experts at reasoning about ethics. It seems like what’s happening (I certainly have never observed “bioethics Twitter” so I am just guessing) is that random people are rationalizing their beliefs by appealing to random prestigious or powerful people and calling them the “experts” to whom you should defer all judgment, and then Julia and Matt are pushing back on that whole general dynamic.
When I heard this, I was simply confused at how unexamined Matt’s position was.
The idea of being an expert on ethics is something the Rationalist is community quite familiar with. Effective Altruism, in general, assumes that an EA mode of moral behavior is in fact something one can develop an expertise in. Perhaps you have different values than EA, but even so, whatever your values, there can be more or less effective ways of achieving them, an expert is just someone who has mapped the tensions and conflicts and contradictions involved in thinking about the territory clearly.
It seems to me that there are many different complaints being raised:
A) Experts in specific things were treated as general authorities.
B) People have differing moral values about what is a good result.
C) The arguments and decisions being made aren’t actually being made by the real experts, they are being made by pseudo-experts.
I think these complaints are not incompatible with some people being experts at reasoning about ethics. It seems like what’s happening (I certainly have never observed “bioethics Twitter” so I am just guessing) is that random people are rationalizing their beliefs by appealing to random prestigious or powerful people and calling them the “experts” to whom you should defer all judgment, and then Julia and Matt are pushing back on that whole general dynamic.