I definitely don’t have the answers, but want to acknowledge that a significant degree of deference to someone or something is simply unavoidable in an increasingly complex world. I feel there’s sometimes this undercurrent (not in your post specifically, just in general) that if you’re a really smart person, you should be able to have well-thought-out, not-too-deferential views on everything of importance. It’s just not possible; no matter how smart someone is, they lack the ability to warp the fabric of time to slow it down enough to reach that end. That’s not meant to discourage anyone from seeking to improve their thinking about the world—it’s to reassure anyone who feels bad about the fact that they have to defer so much.
Each of us have to decide what questions are most important for us to dig deeply into, and which we should rely mainly on deference to answer. This is often affected by the importance of the question, but there are other variables—like how much time we’d have to invest to get a more reliable answer, and the extent to which a change from the answer we are assuming would change our actions.
I know that doesn’t help decide who or what to defer to . . . .
I definitely don’t have the answers, but want to acknowledge that a significant degree of deference to someone or something is simply unavoidable in an increasingly complex world. I feel there’s sometimes this undercurrent (not in your post specifically, just in general) that if you’re a really smart person, you should be able to have well-thought-out, not-too-deferential views on everything of importance. It’s just not possible; no matter how smart someone is, they lack the ability to warp the fabric of time to slow it down enough to reach that end. That’s not meant to discourage anyone from seeking to improve their thinking about the world—it’s to reassure anyone who feels bad about the fact that they have to defer so much.
Each of us have to decide what questions are most important for us to dig deeply into, and which we should rely mainly on deference to answer. This is often affected by the importance of the question, but there are other variables—like how much time we’d have to invest to get a more reliable answer, and the extent to which a change from the answer we are assuming would change our actions.
I know that doesn’t help decide who or what to defer to . . . .
Yeah I don’t have non-deference based arguments of really basic and important things like:
whether stars exist
how the money system works
gravity
And it was only in the last few years that I considered inside view arguments for why the Earth isn’t flat.