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Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
I think that you are pointing to an important grain of truth.
I think that crossing inferential gaps is hard.
Academic writing is one medium. I think that facial expressions have a tonne of information that is hard to capture in writing but can be captured in a picture. To understand maths, writing is fine. To understand the knowledge in people's heads, more high fidelity mediums than writing (like video) is better.
Hi Sophia,
I'm wondering if academics have a built-in bias for complexity and sophistication, because without it, they can't be experts.
Many of the academic posts I see here and elsewhere are very articulate expressions of complexity, but they seem to missing what is sometimes a quite simple bottom line. As example, consider this claim:
If we don't gain control of the knowledge explosion, nothing else really matters.
I strongly agree. I think this question getting downvoted reveals everything wrong with the EA movement. I am thinking it might be to start a new kind of revolution of compassion, patience and rationality. 🤣
What do you think?