often worry that people are being too deferential about their beliefs. I also hear others worrying about this, and nobody seemingly worrying about the reverse, except perhaps my friends and therapists (and I guess honestly people who know cranks, so that’s a bit troubling).
Which leads me to wonder, supposing it’s true that many people are too deferential, what might people do to change it? And can I offer them useful advice, as a person who might be not deferential enough?
Tonight I talked to Joe Carlsmith about this; here are some ideas mostly from the conversation:
A thing that has discouraged me from having independent views and broadcasting them is the concern that my views are extremely ignorant. At the normal pace of new information appearing, I am just too slow a reader to be acceptably up on it. At the AI-news rate, it’s very hopeless. And even if you recognize that situation at a high level, it can be easy to get to thinking ‘I want to write something about W, but I’ll need to read X, Y and the sequence on Z and all the responses to it first’.
It was helpful to me to give up on this kind of expectation, and accept that I’m going to be ignorant and have views anyway. I think this is the right thing to do because a) everyone is fairly ignorant and we don’t want the public discussion to be only the few people who don’t realize they are ignorant or care, and b) saying what you guess is true then letting people point you to why you are wrong is often more efficient than scouring all writing on the topic, and c) there’s value from more independent thinking on a topic, and being informed comes with being less independent. Bringing us to—
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Being sufficiently out of the loop can actually help, as long as you are bold enough not to be silenced by this—if you don’t know what others’ views are, you have to come up with your own.
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Focus on having your own beliefs at a relatively high level. For instance, “Shouldn’t we be stopping AI though?.. Wait, does that argument make sense?” is the kind of thing you can think about and discuss reasonably well without needing to know a lot of technical or fast-moving details, until a more manageable few are brought up in the argument. And my sense is that these kinds of questions—e.g. is our basic strategy what it should be?—are actually neglected.
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Which brings us to status. Intellectual deference probably follows normal patterns of status-based deference. So it probably helps to be either high status or arrogant. That’s a lot of effort, but you can have the experience of being high status or arrogant by talking to people who are relatively lower status or deferential, such as children.
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It probably helps to be brought up in a situation where you learned to distrust the thinking of everyone around you. It’s probably ideal to be taught by your parents that everyone else around is an idiot, then to come to distrust your parents opinions also.
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That’s hard to get later in life. But perhaps you can get something similar from experiencing apparently venerable intellects confidently asserting things, then later observing them to be false.
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If you are in conversations where it seems like the other person isn’t making sense, try to assume that is what’s going on, rather than the potentially much more salient explanation that you are a fool.
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Give esteem to people asking potentially silly questions. It can help to expose yourself to impressive people who do this.
Niels Bohr quotes are helpful (HT Wikiquote)
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Refuse to ‘understand’ things unless they are very clear. I don’t really know how to do this, because I don’t know what the alternative is like—being steadfastly confused about things seems to come naturally to me and I don’t know how else to be, but maybe you have both affordances available here and could lean one way or the other.
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Something something do real thinking versus fake thinking. Ironically, this point I am deferring on, because I haven’t finished listening to Joe’s (so far very interesting) post.
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If you are going to pass on information that you don’t deeply understand, track that it is a different thing, for instance by saying ‘something something…’
I’m interpreting this to mean: don’t be dazzled by bullshit. Don’t just nod along to authoritative-sounding, jargon-filled rhetoric simply because it has the veneer of deepness. Understand here is in quotes. I think it just means in this case to go along.
In grad school, there were many colloquia where a visiting professor would give a presentation. Everyone would nod along. A few polite questions would be asked, and then after some light applause we’d partake of butter cookies and punch. Meanwhile, I would often be sitting there wondering what the hell just happened. What were they really saying? If they were saying X, wasn’t that just complete nonsense? But it would take me a while to think through it and parse it to find out the content really was vacuous.
Over the years I’ve found a good technique is to try to translate complex-sounding claims into their simplest form. Sometimes this is difficult. Some complex things are necessarily complex. In academia, though, complexity is very often a smokescreen, and the simplicity translation often exposes this.
I would suggest also setting up better containers/orientations for deferring. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zLG2DnJw6oEZqAgaE/tools-for-deferring-gracefully