How confident are you that the thing you’re looking into here is going to pay off? (Whatever that means—give you something that lets you reliably improve people’s lives more than existing methods?) I get the sense that you’re reasonably confident, but I don’t think you explicitly say. Gordon’s comment talks about “high EV and low probability”, so I guess Gordon got a different sense from your writing than I did.
How confident should you be that it’s going to pay off? (It is well known that people are sometimes poorly calibrated.)
How confident should other people be that it’s going to pay off? You might have illegible evidence that it’s a fruitful field of study, in which case it seems correct for you to be more confident than others. (Analogy: if you’re selling a used car that you know is not a lemon, it seems correct for you to be more confident of this than your buyer, because distinguishing sellers of lemons from non-lemons is difficult.) But also, I think a lot of people think they have illegible evidence for something when what they actually have is wishful thinking or something. I feel like that’s especially the case in this field of study.
In any case, I think most people should have low confidence that what you’re looking into should pay off; and I think you should probably agree with me on this, even if you think you personally should have high confidence.
Should you be looking into this thing? My instinctive reaction is “why not, seems harmless, worst case scenario is you waste your time and your time is yours to waste”. But actually I agree with what I think Said is saying, that a common result of people looking into this sort of thing is to go crazy, and this is not actually harmless in the same way that doing drugs is not harmless. So I dunno. Not endorsed, but maybe my thinking here is: “if you are not worried about going crazy and taking precautions to avoid, you should not be looking into this; but I’m not a cop, this is not community consensus, so I might judge you for doing things I think are dangerous but I’m not going to additionally judge you for doing things that are widely known to be dangerous.”
Should you be teaching this thing? Under what conditions? I think my feeling is that the conditions should probably not rule out teaching it entirely, but same caveat as with (4), you should be cautious about yourself and your students going crazy. Also I think you should expect skepticism from your students per (2), and I think you should explicitly endorse it. Like, your reaction to “is this backed by scientific studies?” gives me a vibe of “I don’t care and I don’t think you should care”, and I think that’s a bad vibe. I want vibe closer to “your skepticism is great here, totally warranted; but I’m explicitly asking you to set it aside for a bit”.
Some questions we should distinguish here:
How confident are you that the thing you’re looking into here is going to pay off? (Whatever that means—give you something that lets you reliably improve people’s lives more than existing methods?) I get the sense that you’re reasonably confident, but I don’t think you explicitly say. Gordon’s comment talks about “high EV and low probability”, so I guess Gordon got a different sense from your writing than I did.
How confident should you be that it’s going to pay off? (It is well known that people are sometimes poorly calibrated.)
How confident should other people be that it’s going to pay off? You might have illegible evidence that it’s a fruitful field of study, in which case it seems correct for you to be more confident than others. (Analogy: if you’re selling a used car that you know is not a lemon, it seems correct for you to be more confident of this than your buyer, because distinguishing sellers of lemons from non-lemons is difficult.) But also, I think a lot of people think they have illegible evidence for something when what they actually have is wishful thinking or something. I feel like that’s especially the case in this field of study.
In any case, I think most people should have low confidence that what you’re looking into should pay off; and I think you should probably agree with me on this, even if you think you personally should have high confidence.
Should you be looking into this thing? My instinctive reaction is “why not, seems harmless, worst case scenario is you waste your time and your time is yours to waste”. But actually I agree with what I think Said is saying, that a common result of people looking into this sort of thing is to go crazy, and this is not actually harmless in the same way that doing drugs is not harmless. So I dunno. Not endorsed, but maybe my thinking here is: “if you are not worried about going crazy and taking precautions to avoid, you should not be looking into this; but I’m not a cop, this is not community consensus, so I might judge you for doing things I think are dangerous but I’m not going to additionally judge you for doing things that are widely known to be dangerous.”
Should you be teaching this thing? Under what conditions? I think my feeling is that the conditions should probably not rule out teaching it entirely, but same caveat as with (4), you should be cautious about yourself and your students going crazy. Also I think you should expect skepticism from your students per (2), and I think you should explicitly endorse it. Like, your reaction to “is this backed by scientific studies?” gives me a vibe of “I don’t care and I don’t think you should care”, and I think that’s a bad vibe. I want vibe closer to “your skepticism is great here, totally warranted; but I’m explicitly asking you to set it aside for a bit”.