Thanks, Ishaan. That was a lot of good directions to come at this from.
I especially found a few of them novel ways to eke out more confidence from an insulated problem:
If it’s a political issue, try to find out what people who might plausibly be expertish in the area yet don’t seem to be invested in debating the issue think about it.
check what known superforecasters in the field think (people who have a track record of successful predictions in that area). Superforecasters need not actually be loudly engaging with the issue, just ask.
check if people who have different types of knowledge tend to say different things (e.g. economists vs. sociologists)
I’ll try to remember those for questions like this in the future.
Furthermore, notion that you raise struck me:
Most things for which it is important for you to personally understand have measurable consequences to you. Why do you need the right answer to the GMO question, what would you even do with the right answer?
I suppose I’ve never really considered why I wanted the right answer to a question, I suppose I ascribe a relatively high weight to “understand things” in my utility function. That said, thinking about it from the angle of “What would I do with the right answer”: In this case, I would do is embrace/avoid GMO foods for my personal health and safety, vote to label/not-label/ban/regulate GMO, and argue for others to do the same.
Isn’t that the ideal of a democratic system: an informed populace vigorously contesting in the marketplace of ideas?
Yes, that is the ideal, and it’s true that the three consequences you mention are positive consequences (Assuming more effort makes you more likely to arrive at correct answers, which it usually does although I imagine there are diminishing returns past a certain point—you might notice a lot of very smart people putting a lot of effort into politics and still disagreeing.)
The thing is you must weigh information-gathering and evaluation concerning GMOs against every other possible action you could take with those resources.
Let’s focus on the goal which most plausibly requires understanding GMO
for my personal health and safety
Well, let me tell you how i went about researching my personal health and safety:
I researched which foods to eat in general (My conclusions—eat mostly vegetables, meat (try for organ meats and fish), fruits with an overall high fat, low carbohydrate macro-nutrient ratio, avoid vegetable/seed oil, grains. So, in one word, paleolithic. These conclusions are very controversial and I suspect I put in way more effort into researching it than was rationally justified.)
I researched the best way to exercise and learned the techniques (Conclusions: You need to run occasionally and you need to fain flexibility and technique for basic barbell exercises: squat, row, bench, overhead press, etc. I am pretty happy about the time I invested into researching these.)
I’ve put moderate effort into researching basic pesticide avoidance (there are lists of highest pesticide foods you can avoid buying), ethical meat sourcing, and ecologically sustainable fish sourcing. Ultimately I’ve put very little effort into this relative to the first two.)
I’ve skimmed examine.com for potentially helpful supplements (Conclusions: Fish oil, Vit D, Vit K2magnesium (ZMA, don’t use MgO it’s not bioavailable. I probably spent too much time on this.)
GMOs are pretty far down on this list of things which I think are probably important. I haven’t really gotten to them yet.
Do you see where the prioritization issue comes in here? And that’s when your personal health is the main goal. The chance that GMO is high on the priority list in the genre of public dietary health, is in my mind, pretty minuscule. If you narrow your specialization to “regulatory mechanisms concerning food”, then it’ll be worth studying GMOs as one of the branches in your knowledge tree, but probably not before you’ve studied broad stuff about regulatory mechanisms first. (as I understand it, GMOs are not a monolithic thing so it’s more interesting to study start with general stuff about how innovations in food are handled, etc).
You don’t necessarily need to agree with me about prioritization, but you should spend some time thinking about prioritization.
I suppose I ascribe a relatively high weight to “understand things” in my utility function
Of course, we all do. But there is a whole world of things, so, which things, and why? Information due to purely Intrinsic interest is malleable
Thanks, Ishaan. That was a lot of good directions to come at this from.
I especially found a few of them novel ways to eke out more confidence from an insulated problem:
I’ll try to remember those for questions like this in the future.
Furthermore, notion that you raise struck me:
I suppose I’ve never really considered why I wanted the right answer to a question, I suppose I ascribe a relatively high weight to “understand things” in my utility function. That said, thinking about it from the angle of “What would I do with the right answer”: In this case, I would do is embrace/avoid GMO foods for my personal health and safety, vote to label/not-label/ban/regulate GMO, and argue for others to do the same.
Isn’t that the ideal of a democratic system: an informed populace vigorously contesting in the marketplace of ideas?
Yes, that is the ideal, and it’s true that the three consequences you mention are positive consequences (Assuming more effort makes you more likely to arrive at correct answers, which it usually does although I imagine there are diminishing returns past a certain point—you might notice a lot of very smart people putting a lot of effort into politics and still disagreeing.)
The thing is you must weigh information-gathering and evaluation concerning GMOs against every other possible action you could take with those resources.
Let’s focus on the goal which most plausibly requires understanding GMO
Well, let me tell you how i went about researching my personal health and safety:
I researched which foods to eat in general (My conclusions—eat mostly vegetables, meat (try for organ meats and fish), fruits with an overall high fat, low carbohydrate macro-nutrient ratio, avoid vegetable/seed oil, grains. So, in one word, paleolithic. These conclusions are very controversial and I suspect I put in way more effort into researching it than was rationally justified.)
I researched the best way to exercise and learned the techniques (Conclusions: You need to run occasionally and you need to fain flexibility and technique for basic barbell exercises: squat, row, bench, overhead press, etc. I am pretty happy about the time I invested into researching these.)
I’ve put moderate effort into researching basic pesticide avoidance (there are lists of highest pesticide foods you can avoid buying), ethical meat sourcing, and ecologically sustainable fish sourcing. Ultimately I’ve put very little effort into this relative to the first two.)
I’ve skimmed examine.com for potentially helpful supplements (Conclusions: Fish oil, Vit D, Vit K2magnesium (ZMA, don’t use MgO it’s not bioavailable. I probably spent too much time on this.)
GMOs are pretty far down on this list of things which I think are probably important. I haven’t really gotten to them yet.
Do you see where the prioritization issue comes in here? And that’s when your personal health is the main goal. The chance that GMO is high on the priority list in the genre of public dietary health, is in my mind, pretty minuscule. If you narrow your specialization to “regulatory mechanisms concerning food”, then it’ll be worth studying GMOs as one of the branches in your knowledge tree, but probably not before you’ve studied broad stuff about regulatory mechanisms first. (as I understand it, GMOs are not a monolithic thing so it’s more interesting to study start with general stuff about how innovations in food are handled, etc).
You don’t necessarily need to agree with me about prioritization, but you should spend some time thinking about prioritization.
Of course, we all do. But there is a whole world of things, so, which things, and why? Information due to purely Intrinsic interest is malleable