You're right that Ballantyne mainly focuses on epistemic trespassing as something related to question answering rather than question posing. I think this is related to his definition of a field as "an extremely narrow set of questions”; obviously trying to answer a set of questions without any of the relevant evidence and skills (that someone who works in the field has) would be trespassing. On the other hand, asking questions you're not qualified to answer seems a lot more benign; there's no expectation of reliability and little expectation of responsibil...
Maybe there's a combination of birth and environment conditions that maximize utility for an individual, but we may have different values for society in general which would lead to a lower overall utility for a society of identical people. For example, we generally value diversity, and I think the utility function we use for society in general would probably return a lower result for a population of identical optimally born/raised people than for a diverse population of slightly-less-than-optimally born/raised people.
If I'm understanding you correctly, it seems like your worry with applying (D1) to pseudoscience is that it feeds into confirmation bias by making you feel like you're right to dismiss something you already don't think is useful (in a way that you wouldn't dismiss it if you did think it was useful). As I summarize in the next paragraph, Ballantyne agrees with you that it's easy to apply (D1) too often, but maybe even this case that's supposed to be an example of using (D1) correctly is problematic.
Being charitable to Ballantyne, we can imagine that his "co...
I'm not sure whether this is true of chemistry, but the research process you describe certainly sounds plausible. As you say, there may be many cases in which the distribution of labor doesn't matter, because researching different theories looks the same. One area in which researching different theories looks different is research into what killed the dinosaurs. Producing geological evidence relevant to the hypothesis that volcanoes killed the dinosaurs means digging at different sites from those you would investigate for evidence about whether a met...
Other possibilities for earning money is to try to find a thesis at other institutions that pay their students like CWI, Mila,,that or CHAI in Berkeley (for all these, I know students who did their thesis there).
Prospective student here; what finding a thesis at another institution entail? Would a student who wanted to do this begin by emailing professors at these institutions about their research, applying to their "visiting researcher" programs, or something else?
I may be nine years too late to make any kind of difference, but I would caution against any strong attachment to H.P. Lovecraft in particular due to his astounding racism. His fears about the unknown and the "others" are perhaps most apparently race-related in The Shadow Over Innsmouth (it's easy to see how the fishmen are an allegorical representation of people with skin colors Lovecraft didn't like) but in general I think the fact that Lovecraft was super racist is a compelling reason not to hold him up as an icon of rationality, even if some of the non-racist or only-racist-in-context themes of his work are valuable or relatable.
America has contracted the maze disease, and it continues to fester. In other words, even if large corporations with deep hierarchies are actually less prevalent than they once were, the maze cultures in those that exist are far, far more developed.
Some evidence in support of this hypothesis (and by extension, Zvi's claim that mazes are on the rise) is the prevalence of oligopolies in America and the world. It's hard to buy affordable food without indirectly buying from Nestle for example, and in many of America's food deserts the only nearby place to buy ...
I think at least some people do, but I don't have a good argument or evidence to support that claim. Even if your only terminal values are more traditional conceptions of utility, diversity still serves those values really well. A homogenous population is not just more boring, but also less resilient to change (and pathogens, depending on the degree of homogeneity). I think it would be shortsighted and overconfident to design an optimal, identical population since they would lack the resilience and variety of experience to maintain that optimally once any problems appeared.