Community members delegate to high-quality research, think less for themselves but more people end up working in higher-impact causes
to
Community members think for themselves, which improves their ability to do more good, but they make more mistakes
I think there is actually just one correct solution here, namely thinking through everything yourself and trusting community consensus only insofar as you think it can be trusted (which is just thinking through things yourself on the meta-level).
This is the straightforwardly correct thing to do for your personal epistemics, and IMO it’s also the move that maximizes overall impact. It would be kind of strange if the right move was for people to not form beliefs as best they can, or to act on other people’s beliefs rather than their own?
(A sub-point here is that we haven’t figured out all the right approaches yet so we need people to add to the epistemic commons.)
Note that if you place a high degree of trust, then the correct approach to maximize direct impact would generally be to delegate a lot more (and, say, focus on the particularities of your specific actions). I think that it makes a lot of sense to mostly trust the cause-prioritization enterprise as a whole, but maybe this comes at the expense of people doing less independent thinking, which should address your other comment.
Thanks for the post, it was an interesting read!
Responding to one specific point: you compare
to
I think there is actually just one correct solution here, namely thinking through everything yourself and trusting community consensus only insofar as you think it can be trusted (which is just thinking through things yourself on the meta-level).
This is the straightforwardly correct thing to do for your personal epistemics, and IMO it’s also the move that maximizes overall impact. It would be kind of strange if the right move was for people to not form beliefs as best they can, or to act on other people’s beliefs rather than their own?
(A sub-point here is that we haven’t figured out all the right approaches yet so we need people to add to the epistemic commons.)
Note that if you place a high degree of trust, then the correct approach to maximize direct impact would generally be to delegate a lot more (and, say, focus on the particularities of your specific actions). I think that it makes a lot of sense to mostly trust the cause-prioritization enterprise as a whole, but maybe this comes at the expense of people doing less independent thinking, which should address your other comment.