Eliezer on epistemic modesty
Eliezer just posted the first chapter of his new work Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck.
The whole thing (a) is good, I particularly liked this bit:
We might call this argument “Chesterton’s Absence of a Fence.” The thought being: I shouldn’t build a fence here, because if it were a good idea to have a fence here, someone would already have built it. The underlying question here is: How strongly should I expect that this extremely common medical problem has been thoroughly considered by my civilization, and that there’s nothing new, effective, and unconventional that I can personally improvise?
Playing off of Chesterton's Fence.
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