The trouble with this is that it’s a socially awkward move to even imply you might research taboo topics. Better to leave public personna and tricky glomarization out of it, I think. Just publish your research and results anonomously. That seems to me to lead to a better epistemic state for society, since a standard of anonymous publication doesn’t leave a misleading bias in publicly available research.
To pick an uncontroversial example, imagine someone glomerizing in whether the Earth was flat or (approximately) spherical. That would signal that you’re the sort of person who considered a spherical Earth to be a plausible hypothesis, which is almost as bad as actually believing it. All reasonable, right-thinking people, on the other hand, know that it’s obviously flat and wouldn’t even consider such nonsense.
This is why it’s important for the policy be known for the glomarization to be evidence under that policy specifically, which might include something to the effect of “I follow this even in obvious cases so I’m free to also follow it in cases which are mistakenly framed as obvious”.
That said, I’m not thinking about the ‘mundane’ world as Eliezer calls it, where doing this at all would be weird. I guess I’m thinking about the lesswrong blogosphere.
(There’s a hypothetical spectrum from [having a glomarization policy at all is considered weird and socially-bad] to [it is not seen negatively, but you’re not disincentivized from sharing non-exfohazardous beliefs, to begin with])
The trouble with this is that it’s a socially awkward move to even imply you might research taboo topics. Better to leave public personna and tricky glomarization out of it, I think. Just publish your research and results anonomously. That seems to me to lead to a better epistemic state for society, since a standard of anonymous publication doesn’t leave a misleading bias in publicly available research.
To pick an uncontroversial example, imagine someone glomerizing in whether the Earth was flat or (approximately) spherical. That would signal that you’re the sort of person who considered a spherical Earth to be a plausible hypothesis, which is almost as bad as actually believing it. All reasonable, right-thinking people, on the other hand, know that it’s obviously flat and wouldn’t even consider such nonsense.
This is why it’s important for the policy be known for the glomarization to be evidence under that policy specifically, which might include something to the effect of “I follow this even in obvious cases so I’m free to also follow it in cases which are mistakenly framed as obvious”.
That said, I’m not thinking about the ‘mundane’ world as Eliezer calls it, where doing this at all would be weird. I guess I’m thinking about the lesswrong blogosphere.
(There’s a hypothetical spectrum from [having a glomarization policy at all is considered weird and socially-bad] to [it is not seen negatively, but you’re not disincentivized from sharing non-exfohazardous beliefs, to begin with])