04.14.2020
In favor of epistemic trespassing
Here is the link to Annan’s post Dumb and Dumber, its actually quite good. The money quote:
“All these people exhorting amateurs to “stay in their lane” and not muddy the waters by providing analyses and articles about the COVID-19 pandemic would have an easier job of it if it wasn’t for the supposed experts churning out dross on an industrial scale.”
McIntyre responds:
Epistemic trespassing
Shortly after spotting this twitter exchange, I spotted a link to a new paper entitled (tweeted by Oxford Philosophy) entitled Epistemic Trespassing. Excerpts:
“Epistemic trespassers are thinkers who have competence or expertise to make good judgments in one field, but move to another field where they lack competence—and pass judgment nevertheless. We should doubt that trespassers are reliable judges in fields where they are outsiders.” In other words, stay in your lane.
“Trespassing is a significant problem in an age of expertise and punditry, but it’s not new. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates tells us he tracked down citizens in Athens who had reputations for being skilled. He met politicians, poets, and craftsmen and tested their mettle. As Socrates says, he ‘found those who had the highest reputation were nearly the most deficient’ . Socrates diagnosed the problem: because these men had been so successful in their particular crafts, each one ‘thought himself very wise in most important pursuits, and this error of theirs overshadowed the wisdom they had’ . Puffed up by their achievements in one domain, the successful Athenians trespassed on matters about which they were ignorant.”
“First, trespassing is a widespread problem that crops up especially in the practice of interdisciplinary research, as opposed to what we might call ‘single-discipline’ research. Second, reflecting on trespassing should lead us to have greater intellectual modesty, in the sense that we will have good reason to be far less confident we have the right answers to many important questions.”
“Epistemic trespassing of the sort I’ve noted is easy to recognize. Experts drift over a highly-visible boundary line and into a domain where they lack either the relevant evidence or the skills to interpret the evidence well. But they keep talking nonetheless. Experts on a public stage are cast in the role of the ‘public intellectual’ or ‘celebrity academic’. They may find trespassing all but impossible to resist. Microphones are switched on, TV cameras zoom in, and ‘sound bites’ come forth, coaxed out of the commentators by journalists. So what do you have to say about philosophy, Neil deGrasse Tyson? And what about arguments for the existence of God, Professor Dawkins? I don’t think trespassing is exclusively a problem for scholars in the limelight, however, and one of my goals here is to explain why ordinary researchers often risk trespassing, too.”
“But first we must understand what the epistemological problem with trespassing is. There is not only one problem. Consider three types of problematic trespassing cases, where two different fields share a particular question:
- (a) Experts in one field lack another field’s evidence and skills;
- (b) Experts in one field lack evidence from another field but have its skills;
- (c) Experts in one field have evidence from another field but lack its skills.
“I will examine three strategies to justify acts of trespassing and thereby preserve rational confidence in trespassers’ answers to hybridized questions. Again, we are assuming some trespassers are experts in one field but encroach on another field.
- (D1) I am trespassing on another field, but that field does not feature any relevant evidence or skills that bear on my view about p;
- (D2) I am trespassing on another field, but my own field’s evidence conclusively establishes that p is true;
- (D3) I am trespassing on another field, but my own field’s skills successfully ‘transfer’ to the other field.”
“I suspect we must trespass to answer most important questions. Perhaps this means we should never trespass alone. Instead, we must rely on the expertise of others. What we need, to extend the trespassing metaphor, is an ‘easement’ or ‘right of way’ for travel beyond our fields’ boundaries. The right of safe passage could be secured by our collaboration with cross-field experts. Imagine your colleague is a representative source of evidence, skills, and potential criticism from another field. Even if you don’t have direct knowledge of that field, if your colleague tests out your answer to a hybridized question and tells you it sounds right to her, then your view is appar- ently more reasonable than it would have been otherwise. Trespassers may gain reasonable beliefs by engaging in certain kinds of discussion with cross-field colleagues.”
While this paper raises some interesting issues, its main goal seems to be protecting the turf of academic subfields.
- Don’t believe the COVID models – that’s not what they’ for [link]
- Mathematical models to characterize early epidemic growth: A review. [link]
- On the predictability of infectious disease outbreaks [link]
- Dramatic reduction in COVID disaster projections [link]
- America’s most influential COV model just revised its estimates downward – but not all models agree [link]
- How can COVID models get it so wrong? [link]