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Showing posts from September, 2022

Dangers of deference

Sometimes people defer to other people, e.g. by believing what they say, by following orders, or by adopting intents or stances. In many cases it makes sense to defer, since other people know more than you about many things, and it's useful to share eyes and ears, and coordination and specialization are valuable, and one can "inquisitively defer" to opinions by taking them as challenges to investigate further by trying them out for oneself. But there are major issues with deferring, among which are: Deferral-based opinions don't contain the detailed content that generated the opinions, and therefore can't direct action effectively or update on new evidence correctly. Acting based on deferral-based opinions is discouraging because it's especially not the case that the whole of you can see why the action is good. Acting based on deferral-based opinions to some extent removes the "meaning" of learning new information; if you're just going t