Episode 122
I spoke with Professor David Thorstad about:
The practical difficulties of doing interdisciplinary work
Why theories of human rationality should account for boundedness, heuristics, and other cognitive limitations
why EA epistemics suck (ok, it’s a little more nuanced than that)
Professor Thorstad is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, a Senior Research Affiliate at the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford, and a Research Affiliate at the MINT Lab at Australian National University. One strand of his research asks how cognitively limited agents should decide what to do and believe. A second strand asks how altruists should use limited funds to do good effectively.
Reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions.
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Outline:
(00:00) Intro
(01:15) David’s interest in rationality
(02:45) David’s crisis of confidence, models abstracted from psychology
(05:00) Blending formal models with studies of the mind
(06:25) Interaction between academic communities
(08:24) Recognition of and incentives for interdisciplinary work
(09:40) Movement towards interdisciplinary work
(12:10) The Standard Picture of rationality
(14:11) Why the Standard Picture was attractive
(16:30) Violations of and rebellion against the Standard Picture
(19:32) Mistakes made by critics of the Standard Picture
(22:35) Other competing programs vs Standard Picture
(26:27) Characterizing Bounded Rationality
(27:00) A worry: faculties criticizing themselves
(29:28) Self-improving critique and longtermism
(30:25) Central claims in bounded rationality and controversies
(32:33) Heuristics and formal theorizing
(35:02) Violations of Standard Picture, vindicatory epistemology
(37:03) The Reason Responsive Consequentialist View (RRCV)
(38:30) Objective and subjective pictures
(41:35) Reason responsiveness
(43:37) There are no epistemic norms for inquiry
(44:00) Norms vs reasons
(45:15) Arguments against epistemic nihilism for belief
(47:30) Norms and self-delusion
(49:55) Difficulty of holding beliefs for pragmatic reasons
(50:50) The Gibbardian picture, inquiry as an action
(52:15) Thinking how to act and thinking how to live — the power of inquiry
(53:55) Overthinking and conducting inquiry
(56:30) Is thinking how to inquire as an all-things-considered matter?
(58:00) Arguments for the RRCV
(1:00:40) Deciding on minimal criteria for the view, stereotyping
(1:02:15) Eliminating stereotypes from the theory
(1:04:20) Theory construction in epistemology and moral intuition
(1:08:20) Refusing theories for moral reasons and disciplinary boundaries
(1:10:30) The argument from minimal criteria, evaluating against competing views
(1:13:45) Comparing to other theories
(1:15:00) The explanatory argument
(1:17:53) Parfit and Railton, norms of friendship vs utility
(1:20:00) Should you call out your friend for being a womanizer
(1:22:00) Vindicatory Epistemology
(1:23:05) Panglossianism and meliorative epistemology
(1:24:42) Heuristics and recognition-driven investigation
(1:26:33) Rational inquiry leading to irrational beliefs — metacognitive processing
(1:29:08) Stakes of inquiry and costs of metacognitive processing
(1:30:00) When agents are incoherent, focuses on inquiry
(1:32:05) Indirect normative assessment and its consequences
(1:37:47) Against the Singularity Hypothesis
(1:39:00) Superintelligence and the ontological argument
(1:41:50) Hardware growth and general intelligence growth, AGI definitions
(1:43:55) Difficulties in arguing for hyperbolic growth
(1:46:07) Chalmers and the proportionality argument
(1:47:53) Arguments for/against diminishing growth, research productivity, Moore’s Law
(1:50:08) On progress studies
(1:52:40) Improving research productivity and technology growth
(1:54:00) Mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk, longtermist epistemics
(1:55:30) Cumulative and per-unit risk
(1:57:37) Back and forth with longtermists, time of perils
(1:59:05) Background risk — risks we can and can’t intervene on, total existential risk
(2:00:56) The case for longtermism is inflated
(2:01:40) Epistemic humility and longtermism
(2:03:15) Knowledge production — reliable sources, blog posts vs peer review
(2:04:50) Compounding potential errors in knowledge
(2:06:38) Group deliberation dynamics, academic consensus
(2:08:30) The scope of longtermism
(2:08:30) Money in effective altruism and processes of inquiry
(2:10:15) Swamping longtermist options
(2:12:00) Washing out arguments and justified belief
(2:13:50) The difficulty of long-term forecasting and interventions
(2:15:50) Theory of change in the bounded rationality program
(2:18:45) Outro
Links:
Papers mentioned/read
Bounded rationality and inquiry
Global priorities and effective altruism
David Thorstad: Bounded Rationality and the Case Against Longtermism