Incompetence is at least as bad as dishonesty. Not sure if it can be distinguished.
No! The distinction not only exists but is incredibly important to this context. Incompetence is a problem of an unqualified person doing the job. It can be fixed by many things, e.g. better on-the-job training, better education, or experience. Replacing them with a more qualified candidate is also an option, assuming you can find one.
With a dishonest person, you have a problem of values; they are likely to defect rather than behave superrationally in game-theoretic situations. The only way to deal with that is to keep them out of positions that require trust.
Dishonesty can be used to cover one’s tracks when one is incompetent. (Bob Nelson was doing this.) I’m not arguing that incompetence isn’t Bayesean evidence for dishonesty—it is. However, there are plenty of other explanations for incompetence as well: cognitive bias (e.g. near/far bias), lack of relevant experience, personality not suited to the job, extreme difficulty of the job, lack of information and feedback to learn from mistakes, lack of time spent learning the job...
Of all these, why did your mental pattern-matching algorithms choose to privilege dishonesty as likely to be prevalent? Doesn’t the fact that there is all this public information about their failings strike you as evidence that they are generally more interested in learning from their mistakes rather than covering their tracks?
I’ve even seen Max More (Alcor’s current CEO) saying positive things about Chronosphere, despite having been personally named and criticized in several of Darwin’s articles. The culture surrounding cryonics during the few years I’ve been observing it actually seems to be one of skeptical reserve and indeed hunger for criticism.
Moreover, the distinction cuts both ways: Multiple cryobiologists who are highly competent in their field have repeatedly made demonstrably false statements about cryonics, and have demonstrated willingness to use political force to silence the opposition. There is no inherent contradiction in the statement that they are competent and dishonest, both capable of doing a good job and willing to refuse to do so. Morality is not the same thing as ability.
Incompetence is at least as bad as dishonesty. Not sure if it can be distinguished.
No! The distinction not only exists but is incredibly important to this context. Incompetence is a problem of an unqualified person doing the job. It can be fixed by many things, e.g. better on-the-job training, better education, or experience. Replacing them with a more qualified candidate is also an option, assuming you can find one.
With a dishonest person, you have a problem of values; they are likely to defect rather than behave superrationally in game-theoretic situations. The only way to deal with that is to keep them out of positions that require trust.
Dishonesty can be used to cover one’s tracks when one is incompetent. (Bob Nelson was doing this.) I’m not arguing that incompetence isn’t Bayesean evidence for dishonesty—it is. However, there are plenty of other explanations for incompetence as well: cognitive bias (e.g. near/far bias), lack of relevant experience, personality not suited to the job, extreme difficulty of the job, lack of information and feedback to learn from mistakes, lack of time spent learning the job...
Of all these, why did your mental pattern-matching algorithms choose to privilege dishonesty as likely to be prevalent? Doesn’t the fact that there is all this public information about their failings strike you as evidence that they are generally more interested in learning from their mistakes rather than covering their tracks?
I’ve even seen Max More (Alcor’s current CEO) saying positive things about Chronosphere, despite having been personally named and criticized in several of Darwin’s articles. The culture surrounding cryonics during the few years I’ve been observing it actually seems to be one of skeptical reserve and indeed hunger for criticism.
Moreover, the distinction cuts both ways: Multiple cryobiologists who are highly competent in their field have repeatedly made demonstrably false statements about cryonics, and have demonstrated willingness to use political force to silence the opposition. There is no inherent contradiction in the statement that they are competent and dishonest, both capable of doing a good job and willing to refuse to do so. Morality is not the same thing as ability.