I decided to ignore Michael after our first in-person conversation, where he said I shouldn’t praise the Swiss healthcare system which I have lots of experience with, because MetaMed is the only working healthcare system in the world (and a roomful of rationalists nodded along to that, suggesting that I bet money against him or something).
This isn’t to single out Michael or the LW community. The world is full of people who spout nonsense confidently. Their ideas can deserve close attention from a few “angel investors”, but that doesn’t mean they deserve everyone’s attention by default, as Scott seems to say.
There’s a really good idea slipped into the above comment in passing; the purpose of this comment is to draw attention to it.
close attention from a few “angel investors”
Scott’s article, like the earlier “epistemic tenure” one, implicitly assumes that we’re setting a single policy for whose ideas get taken how seriously. But it may make sense for some people or communities—these “angel investors”—to take seriously a wider range of ideas than the rest of us, even knowing that a lot of those ideas will turn out to be bad ones, in the hope that they can eventually identify which ones were actually any good and promote those more widely.
Taking the parallel a bit further, in business there are more levels of filtering than that. You have the crazy startups; then you have the angel investors; then you have the early-stage VCs; then you have the later VCs; and then you have, I dunno, all the world’s investors. There are actually two layers of filtering at each stage—investors may choose not to invest, and the company may fail despite the investment—but let’s leave that out for now. The equivalent in the marketplace of ideas would be a sort of hierarchy of credibility-donors: first of all you have individuals coming up with possibly-crackpot ideas, then some of them get traction in particular communities, then some of those come to the attention of Gladwell-style popularizers, and then some of the stuff they popularize actually makes it all the way into the general public’s awareness. At each stage it should be somewhat harder to get treated as credible. (But is it? I wouldn’t count on it. In particular, popularizers don’t have the best reputation for never latching onto bad ideas and making them sound more credible than they really are...)
(Perhaps the LW community itself should be an “angel investor”, but not necessarily.)
I decided to ignore Michael after our first in-person conversation, where he said I shouldn’t praise the Swiss healthcare system which I have lots of experience with, because MetaMed is the only working healthcare system in the world (and a roomful of rationalists nodded along to that, suggesting that I bet money against him or something).
This isn’t to single out Michael or the LW community. The world is full of people who spout nonsense confidently. Their ideas can deserve close attention from a few “angel investors”, but that doesn’t mean they deserve everyone’s attention by default, as Scott seems to say.
There’s a really good idea slipped into the above comment in passing; the purpose of this comment is to draw attention to it.
Scott’s article, like the earlier “epistemic tenure” one, implicitly assumes that we’re setting a single policy for whose ideas get taken how seriously. But it may make sense for some people or communities—these “angel investors”—to take seriously a wider range of ideas than the rest of us, even knowing that a lot of those ideas will turn out to be bad ones, in the hope that they can eventually identify which ones were actually any good and promote those more widely.
Taking the parallel a bit further, in business there are more levels of filtering than that. You have the crazy startups; then you have the angel investors; then you have the early-stage VCs; then you have the later VCs; and then you have, I dunno, all the world’s investors. There are actually two layers of filtering at each stage—investors may choose not to invest, and the company may fail despite the investment—but let’s leave that out for now. The equivalent in the marketplace of ideas would be a sort of hierarchy of credibility-donors: first of all you have individuals coming up with possibly-crackpot ideas, then some of them get traction in particular communities, then some of those come to the attention of Gladwell-style popularizers, and then some of the stuff they popularize actually makes it all the way into the general public’s awareness. At each stage it should be somewhat harder to get treated as credible. (But is it? I wouldn’t count on it. In particular, popularizers don’t have the best reputation for never latching onto bad ideas and making them sound more credible than they really are...)
(Perhaps the LW community itself should be an “angel investor”, but not necessarily.)