Speaker: Hein Duijf (Utrecht University)
Date and Time: Thursday, April 3rd 2025, 16:30-18:00
Venue: ILLC Seminar Room F1.15, Science Park 107 and online.
Title: The diversity-expertise tradeoff
Abstract. Democratic theorists and social epistemologists often celebrate the epistemic benefits of diversity. One of the cornerstones is the ‘diversity trumps ability’ theorem and simulation results by Hong and Page (2004). Ironically, the interplay between diversity and ability is rarely studied in radically different frameworks. In fact, Hong and Page’s landscape models apply predominantly to search problems where the groups must find the optimal decision among thousands of options. Their landscape models are ineffective in binary or sparse classification problems, i.e., where agents must select the objectively or intersubjectively correct option among a few options. To fill this gap, I will introduce a new evidential sources framework for binary classification problems, where agents rely on imperfect sources to identify the best solution. I use this new evidential sources framework to assess whether, when, and (if so) why diversity trumps expertise in binary classification problems.