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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Levels of Pluralism, published by Adam Shimi on July 27, 2022 on The AI Alignment Forum. This work was done while at Conjecture. Preparing the Pluralism Question When do we want all our research eggs in the same paradigm basket? Although most people don't go as far as the extreme paradigmatism of Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which only allows one paradigm at time (for a given science), the preference for less rather than more options is still pervasive. In the ideal, a convergence to one, even if it's not always feasible. After all, there's only one correct answer, right? Putting that debatable question aside, I've become more and more convinced that pluralism, the pursuit of multiple lines of research in parallel, is far more prevalent and integral to the process of science than Kuhn's naive paradigmatism. This realization has emerged from studying History and Philosophy of Science, especially outside of physics which for many reasons is quite an unrepresentative science. But one crucial preliminary point is that pluralism can appear at multiple levels. And the value of pluralism also depends on the level at which it is applied. So this post proposes a decomposition of the activity of research into four levels, and introduces the corresponding pluralism at each level. Although the point here is not (yet) to argue for pluralism, I offer some examples of pluralistic successes, as well as arguments for the epistemic circumstances where pluralism seems the most valuable. I also finish by proposing a geometric model for when each level of pluralism makes sense, based around considering bits of evidence as objects in high-dimensional space. The four levels of pluralism I discuss are: Individual pluralism: pluralism of the methods, ideas, and analogies used by a single researcher or a single research tradition. Approach pluralism: pluralism of approaches to the same operationalization of the problem. Operationalization pluralism: pluralism in the way that the problem itself is operationalized. Problem pluralism: pluralism in the problem itself. Thanks to Andrea Motti for feedback on a draft of this post. Simplifying Assumption: Focus on Epistemic Circumstances When investigating under which circumstances some epistemic strategy applies, there are many confusing and complicating factors coming from psychology and sociology. Taking pluralism as an example, the following non-exhaustive list comes to mind: How easy/difficult is it for researchers to keep multiple approaches at different levels? How confusing is it for researchers to keep multiple approaches at different levels? Do we have enough resources for implementing the ideal level of pluralism? How should we implement it, given the social structures and the psychological difficulties? My stance here, and more generally, is to neglect these issues so I can focus on the ideal epistemic algorithm under the circumstances studied. The rationale is that the sociological and psychological factors can be better dealt with once we know the ideal strategy, and removing them gives us an idealization that is easier to work with. In some this emulates how most physics approximations remove the details (often ultimately important details) to get to the core insight. Although I expect this to work, note that this is in tension with epistemological vigilance: there is some chance that the sociological and psychological factors matter so much that it makes more sense to include part of them in the ideal answer. Levels: from Individuals to Problems Individual Pluralism If we zoom in on a particular research approach or tradition, we might expect to be too low-level for pluralism to appear. Yet pluralism isn't only about portfolios of approaches — a single tradition can be pluralist in its methods, ideas, and an...