My latest summary is for Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck, in which Eliezer Yudkowsky pushes back against what he calls "modest epistemology".

As usual, the key takeaways are below, and you can find the full summary by clicking the link above.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Two competing views on when you should think you may be able to do something unusually well:
  • Inadequacy. We should understand how different systems work and the incentives within them to determine whether we’ll be able to outperform them.
  • Modesty. We should always defer to “experts” or “the crowd” because the average person will not be able to outperform them.
• Inadequate systems are surprisingly common because of misaligned incentives and coordination problems. Even if someone spots an inadequacy, it’s usually inexploitable in terms of money or prestige, so the inadequacy does not get fixed.
• Modest epistemology seems primarily motivated by social considerations:
  • It’s not necessarily arrogant to think you can outperform a system of experts on some dimensions. Systems can easily end up ‘dumber’ than the people within them. Rather than worrying about whether you are smarter or dumber in general, treat adequacy as a technical question where the answer shifts depending on the situation.
  • While correcting for overconfidence is good, underconfidence is just as big an epistemological error as overconfidence—just less of a social one.
  • People act to protect status hierarchies when they slap down those who try to “steal” status by attempting to do much better than normal.
• But sometimes modesty seems to be based on misunderstandings of the following:
  • Applying base rates or the “outside view”. While Yudkowsky agrees this is a good idea, you can get reference class tennis when two sides disagree on which reference class to use.
  • Distrust of theories and models. The concern seems to be that people get too wedded to their theories and apply motivated reasoning to explain away all evidence that conflicts with it. But the answer there is to avoid motivated reasoning, not avoid theories and models.
• It’s much easier to identify the correct contrarian experts in an existing field than to become one yourself.
• Don’t overcorrect by falling into sloppy cynicism. The amount of failure to be explained is bounded.

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​To Summarise​