How about "don't go against conventional wisdom unless you have a good reason; the more conventional the wisdom, the better the reason needs to be"? Possibly combined with "be humble and give subject matter experts some credit, an hour on Google Scholar doesn't mean you've learned everything".
If the conventional wisdom is "don't order research chemicals from a lab in China then self-inject them", then maybe a plan to get a peptide lab to manufacture cheap Semaglutide is dangerous, even if you can't explain exactly why it's dangerous (in this case it's probably pretty obvious).
If, on the other hand, the conventional wisdom is "eat 6 - 11 servings of grain and 3 - 5 servings of vegetables a day", but many nutritionists are recommending less grain and there's new research out saying that much higher vegetable intake is good, maybe a plan to eat more vegetables and less bread is good.
> How about "don't go against conventional wisdom unless you have a good reason; the more conventional the wisdom, the better the reason needs to be"? Possibly combined with "be humble and give subject matter experts some credit,
I have a feeling that this is basically the generic talking point to use when your opponent is more radical than you. The opposite would be you accusing your opponent as luddites or whatever because they're too bought into "conventional wisdom". Neither are actually helpful epistemically because the line for "good reason" is entirely arbitrary, and is easily colored by your beliefs.
>an hour on Google Scholar doesn't mean you've learned everything".
>If the conventional wisdom is "don't order research chemicals from a lab in China then self-inject them", then maybe a plan to get a peptide lab to manufacture cheap Semaglutide is dangerous, even if you can't explain exactly why it's dangerous (in this case it's probably pretty obvious).
I think you're painting effective altruism with too broad a brush and giving them too little credit. I'm very skeptical that the typical effective altruist is ordering semaglutide from china or that the typical EA analysis on x-risk is based on "an hour on Google Scholar".
>If, on the other hand, the conventional wisdom is "eat 6 - 11 servings of grain and 3 - 5 servings of vegetables a day", but many nutritionists are recommending less grain and there's new research out saying that much higher vegetable intake is good, maybe a plan to eat more vegetables and less bread is good.
Hold on, all it takes to turn over "conventional wisdom" on nutrition is "many nutritionists" and "new research"? Does some well researched books like "The Precipice" or "What We Owe the Future" suffice here? I'm sure that among all the effective altruists out there, you can find among them "many" to support their claim?
> I have a feeling that this is basically the generic talking point to use when your opponent is more radical than you.
EA people would probably phrase it as something about how updating strong priors in response to weak evidence needs to happen slowly, but I feel the Bayesian formulation is a bit toothless when it comes to practical applications.
The broader point is that when your opponent is more radical than you on a factual issue[0], but they don't present any evidence for why, they're probably wrong. This isn't good enough in a debate but it's a fine heuristic for deciding whether to use opioids as performance enhancers.
> I think you're painting effective altruism with too broad a brush and giving them too little credit. I'm very skeptical that the typical effective altruist is ordering semaglutide from china
This is a fair criticism, but I didn't mean to apply it to the movement as a whole, only to the particular failure mode where some effective altruists (or more generally, rationalists) talk themselves into doing bizarre and harmful things that equivalently smart non-EAs would not. It's easy to talk about Chesterton's Fence but it's not so easy to remember it when you read about something cool on Wikipedia or HN.
> Hold on, all it takes to turn over "conventional wisdom" on nutrition is "many nutritionists" and "new research"?
I'm just looking for a heuristic that stops you doing weird rationalist stuff, not a population-wide set of dietary recommendations. It's okay if some low-risk experimentation slips through, even if it's not statistically rigorous and even if it's very slightly harmful.
The point is that there are two requirements being met: first, no strong expert consensus ("many nutritionists" was too weak a phrasing and I apologise), and second, if you ask a few random strangers (representing conventional wisdom) whether eating more vegetables and less bread is good for you they'll tell you to go for it if you want to, while if you ask about using non-prescription opioids they'll be against it.
If the conventional wisdom is "don't order research chemicals from a lab in China then self-inject them", then maybe a plan to get a peptide lab to manufacture cheap Semaglutide is dangerous, even if you can't explain exactly why it's dangerous (in this case it's probably pretty obvious).
If, on the other hand, the conventional wisdom is "eat 6 - 11 servings of grain and 3 - 5 servings of vegetables a day", but many nutritionists are recommending less grain and there's new research out saying that much higher vegetable intake is good, maybe a plan to eat more vegetables and less bread is good.