TF Colloquium: Diversity and Expertise in Binary Classification Problems

Speaker: Hein Duijf (Utrecht University)

Democratic theorists and social epistemologists often celebrate the epistemic benefits of diversity. One of the cornerstones is the ‘diversity trumps ability’ result by Hong and Page (2004). Ironically, the interplay between diversity and ability is rarely studied in radically different frameworks. Although diversity has been studied in prediction and search problems, the diversity-expertise tradeoff has not been studied systematically for small, deliberative groups facing binary classification problems. To fill this gap, I will introduce a new evidential sources framework and study whether, when, and (if so) why diversity trumps expertise in binary classification problems. In turn, this formal framework will be employed to scrutinize the epistemic merits of deliberative and aggregative democracy compared to epistocracy.