Okay, well, just to report that what you said by way of clarification was reassuring but not what I picked up originally from your post! I agree with Vaidehi below that an issue was a lack of specificity, which led to me reading it as a pretty general comment.
Reading your other comments, it seems what you’re getting at is a distinction between trusting someone is right without understanding why vs just following their instructions. I agree that there’s something there: to e.g. run an organisation, it’s sometimes impractical or unnecessary to convince someone of your entire worldview vs just ask them to do something.
FWIW, what I see lots of in EA, worries me, and I was hoping your post would be about, is that people defer so strongly to community leaders that they refuse to even engage with object-level arguments against whatever it is that community leaders believe. To draw from a personal example, quite often when I talk about measuring wellbeing, people will listen and then say something to the effect of “what you say seems plausible, I can’t think of any objections, but I’m going to defer to GiveWell anyway”. Deferring may have a time and a place, but presumably we don’t want deference to this extent.
Okay, well, just to report that what you said by way of clarification was reassuring but not what I picked up originally from your post! I agree with Vaidehi below that an issue was a lack of specificity, which led to me reading it as a pretty general comment.
Reading your other comments, it seems what you’re getting at is a distinction between trusting someone is right without understanding why vs just following their instructions. I agree that there’s something there: to e.g. run an organisation, it’s sometimes impractical or unnecessary to convince someone of your entire worldview vs just ask them to do something.
FWIW, what I see lots of in EA, worries me, and I was hoping your post would be about, is that people defer so strongly to community leaders that they refuse to even engage with object-level arguments against whatever it is that community leaders believe. To draw from a personal example, quite often when I talk about measuring wellbeing, people will listen and then say something to the effect of “what you say seems plausible, I can’t think of any objections, but I’m going to defer to GiveWell anyway”. Deferring may have a time and a place, but presumably we don’t want deference to this extent.