Thread · 3 tweets · 4 Aug 2022

"Hostage" sounds like it's necessarily bad or at least does more harm than good. That's quite a bias to start from! Yes, it probably means that we regularly fail to improve *individually*, but are the social trade offs bad?

Imagine the level of individual expertise (and the time, even for experts) required to properly evaluate a paper of any useful complexity. Deferring to a community has benefits. Avoiding the pitfalls requires good societal properties: diversity, and equality.

(The former for viewpoint variety, the latter to avoid the distortions from power in epistemic democracy.) There's a good treatment of some of this in "Bad Beliefs" from Neil Levy, and related contemporary concerns in berjon.com/stewardship/.