“Rely more on other people’s views in the rationality community” is inherently a bias-variance tradeoff. It’s also collectively self-defeating, with a potential to become a death spiral. As such, it may be a reasonable thing to do, but it is potentially very dangerous as a principle to state for others to follow. The selfishly-first-order-rational thing to do would be to do more of it yourself, and encourage others to do less of it; of course, this is free riding, and may not be meta-rational.
My point is: this may be wise, but you should beware, and you should definitely not encourage others to do this without cautioning them against the risks.
One way to beware about this is to ask the question: “which of the biggest differences between rationality community conventional beliefs, and general ‘smart non-explicit-rationalist’ conventional beliefs, have the weakest support?” I have personal answers to that question but in the spirit of this comment, I won’t share them here.
I agree that it could be a death spiral, and think the caution is in general warranted. My personal situation was one where I had fairly little personal interaction with members of the community—though this is likely less true not—but that was why I decided that explicitly considering the consensus opinions was reasonable.
“Rely more on other people’s views in the rationality community” is inherently a bias-variance tradeoff. It’s also collectively self-defeating, with a potential to become a death spiral. As such, it may be a reasonable thing to do, but it is potentially very dangerous as a principle to state for others to follow. The selfishly-first-order-rational thing to do would be to do more of it yourself, and encourage others to do less of it; of course, this is free riding, and may not be meta-rational.
My point is: this may be wise, but you should beware, and you should definitely not encourage others to do this without cautioning them against the risks.
One way to beware about this is to ask the question: “which of the biggest differences between rationality community conventional beliefs, and general ‘smart non-explicit-rationalist’ conventional beliefs, have the weakest support?” I have personal answers to that question but in the spirit of this comment, I won’t share them here.
I agree that it could be a death spiral, and think the caution is in general warranted. My personal situation was one where I had fairly little personal interaction with members of the community—though this is likely less true not—but that was why I decided that explicitly considering the consensus opinions was reasonable.