Totally agree. It’s the same reason they say that the best way to learn something is to teach it: it forces you to understand something from the ground up. But if rederiving something from scratch takes a lot of time and energy, then there has to be a good incentive for doing it. I think that’s what’s missing: incentive. “People should do difficult thinking to produce more impact” is a fine value to have, but without being able to point to any specific problem being caused by its absence, there’s no motivation for anyone to enact that value. It’s hard to be motivated to solve an abstract problem that may not even exist when there are real ones sitting in front of us.
tristan.camacho
Karma: 6
Lovely post.
Without citing any specific incidents being pointed at where “this person didn’t think it through” is clearly at play, it’s hard to form more tangible hypotheses about why this is, but when I introspect about this in my situation, these are the reasons I come up with.
1. Thought leaders lead for a reason, usually. Now that I’ve read articles on 80,000 Hours, read a bunch of EA books, and taken the EA introductory and in-depth courses, it’s readily apparent to me that I’m not at the top of the intellectual bell curve. When I read an article by Holden Karnofsky, for example, it’s obvious that he’s done a better quality of work thinking about a given topic than I could. I don’t have any reason to believe that I’m going to be able to come up with anything better, so I default to believing whatever the smarter person has to say.
2. Thinking is hard. I remember the author David Epstein quoting someone, saying that we believe that the brain is designed to think, but it’s actually designed not to think. Biologically speaking, thought is expensive, so our brain comes up with all kinds of shortcuts and heuristics to avoid having to think to much. I rely on others who are better at thinking (or just have more knowledge on a given topic) than me because it’s “cheaper” from an energy perspective.
3. Thinking takes time. I have a job, friends, hobbies, etc., and I tend to prioritize them over re-deriving a Theory of Change from first principles because they’re instrumental to my wellbeing. Unless there’s a clear problem with the Theory of Change that necessitates me going back to square one, I’d rather just get on with my life.
I don’t say all of this to naysay your point; I’m not about to go onto the LessWrong forum and speak out against critical thinking. In fact, I think what you’re saying is very valuable. I just think it’s also worth understanding why people are the way they are.
For this reason, EA organizations seem to rely less on credentials and more on short answer questions, writing samples, structured interviews, and work tests.
Then again, there is a weakness to just relying on that information. A candidate might be very intelligent and have thought about a problem very deeply but then have no track record for doing the actual work: a “living in the clouds” intellectual. Credentials and achievements are usually used as proxies for past evidence of hard work and general career direction, even if they don’t necessarily filter for critical thinking.