It seems like you wanted me to respond to this comment, so I’ll write a quick reply.
Now for the rub: I think anyone working on AI alignment (or any technical question of comparable difficulty) mustn’t exhibit this attitude with respect to [the thing they’re working on]. If you have a problem where you’re not able to achieve high confidence in your own models of something (relative to competing ambient models), you’re not going to be able to follow your own thoughts far enough to do good work—not without being interrupted by thoughts like “But if I multiply the probability of this assumption being true, by the probability of that assumption being true, by the probability of that assumption being true...” and “But [insert smart person here] thinks this assumption is unlikely to be true, so what probability should I assign to it really?”
This doesn’t seem true for me. I think through details of exotic hypotheticals all the time.
Maybe others are different. But it seems like maybe you’re proposing that people self-deceive in order to get themselves confident enough to explore the ramifications of a particular hypothesis. I think we should be a bit skeptical of intentional self-deception. And if self-deception is really necessary, let’s make it a temporary suspension of belief sort of thing, as opposed to a life belief that leads you to not talk to those with other views.
It’s been a while since I read Inadequate Equilibria. But I remember the message of the book being fairly nuanced. For example, it seems pretty likely to me that there’s no specific passage which contradicts the statement “hedgehogs make better predictions on average than foxes”.
I support people trying to figure things out for themselves, and I apologize if I unintentionally discouraged anyone from doing that—it wasn’t my intention. I also think people consider learning from disagreement to be virtuous for a good reason, not just due to “epistemic learned helplessness”. Also, learning from disagreement seems importantly different from generic deference—especially if you took the time to learn about their views and found yourself unpersuaded. Basically, I think people should account for both known unknowns (in the form of people who disagree whose views you don’t understand) and unknown unknowns, but it seems OK to not defer to the masses / defer to authorities if you have a solid grasp of how they came to their conclusion (this is my attempt to restate the thesis of Inadequate Equilibria as I remember it).
I don’t deny that learning from disagreement has costs. Probably some people do it too much. I encouraged MIRI to do it more on the margin, but it could be that my guess about their current margin is incorrect, who knows.
I think this is usually done subconsciously—people are more motivated to find issues with arguments they disagree with.