Learning from experts is very useful. On the other hand, the time of experts is often scarce. If I have a random basic level question about quantum physics, I would expect that those rationalists who are experts in quantum physics and who don’t know me would have little interest in getting a cold email from me to answer a basic question about the field.
My Habryka (and thus Lightcone Infrastructure) model would worry about how to do the gatekeeping to protect the valuable time of experts. That’s likely the more important problem to solve than thinking about how to validate whether the expertise people claim for themselves is correct.
Expertise by its nature is also complex. A surgeon and a massage therapist might both be experts in anatomy but understand different parts of it well. Expertise gets acquired by studying a given paradigm for a topic and when there are multiple paradigms that gather knowledge about a given topic it can be hard to know which of those will give the best answer to a given question.
My Habryka (and thus Lightcone Infrastructure) model would worry about how to do the gatekeeping to protect the valuable time of experts. That’s likely the more important problem to solve than thinking about how to validate whether the expertise people claim for themselves is correct.
Hmm good point. Maybe money can solve it? Put up prices based on the value of your time, and the incentives can sort out the rest.
Expertise by its nature is also complex. A surgeon and a massage therapist might both be experts in anatomy but understand different parts of it well. Expertise gets acquired by studying a given paradigm for a topic and when there are multiple paradigms that gather knowledge about a given topic it can be hard to know which of those will give the best answer to a given question.
That is true, though I think the rationalist advantage in g and curiosity means that we tend to have much broader areas of expertise than usually, and also I think someone with expertise in an adjacent area would have a much better idea of whether questions are answerable and about who can answer the questions, even if they can’t themselves answer them, and so I think it could still be very helpful.
Learning from experts is very useful. On the other hand, the time of experts is often scarce. If I have a random basic level question about quantum physics, I would expect that those rationalists who are experts in quantum physics and who don’t know me would have little interest in getting a cold email from me to answer a basic question about the field.
My Habryka (and thus Lightcone Infrastructure) model would worry about how to do the gatekeeping to protect the valuable time of experts. That’s likely the more important problem to solve than thinking about how to validate whether the expertise people claim for themselves is correct.
Expertise by its nature is also complex. A surgeon and a massage therapist might both be experts in anatomy but understand different parts of it well. Expertise gets acquired by studying a given paradigm for a topic and when there are multiple paradigms that gather knowledge about a given topic it can be hard to know which of those will give the best answer to a given question.
Hmm good point. Maybe money can solve it? Put up prices based on the value of your time, and the incentives can sort out the rest.
That is true, though I think the rationalist advantage in g and curiosity means that we tend to have much broader areas of expertise than usually, and also I think someone with expertise in an adjacent area would have a much better idea of whether questions are answerable and about who can answer the questions, even if they can’t themselves answer them, and so I think it could still be very helpful.