Thanks for writing this post. I think it’s really to distinguish the two types of deference and push the conversation toward the question of when to defer as opposed to how good it is in general.
ButI think “deferring to authority” is bad branding (as you worry about below) and I’m not sure your definition totally captures what you mean. I think it’s probably worth changing even though I haven’t come up with great alternatives.
Branding. To my ear, deferring to authority has a very negative connotation. It suggests deferring to a preexisting authority because they have power over you, not deferring to a person/norm/institution/process because you’re bought into the value of coordination. Relatedly, it doesn’t seem like the most natural phrase to capture a lot of your central examples.
Substantive definition. I don’t think “adopting someone else’s view because of a social contract to do so” is exactly what you mean. It suggests that if someone were not to defer in one of these cases, they’d be violating a social contract (or at least a norm or expectation), whereas I think you want to include lots of instances where that’s not the case (e.g. you might defer as a solution to the unilateralist’s curse even if you were under no implicit contract to do so). Most of your examples also seem to be more about acting based on someone else’s view or a norm/rule/process/institution and not really about adopting their view.[1] This seems important since I think you’re trying to create space for people to coordinate by acting against their own view while continuing to hold that view.
I actually think the epistemics v. action distinction is a cleaner distinction so I might base your categories just on whether you’re changing your views v. your actions (though I suspect you considered this and decided against).
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Brainstorm of other names for non-epistemic deferring (none are great). Pragmatic deferring. Action deferring. Praxological deferring (eww). Deferring for coordination.
(I actually suspect that you might just want to call this something other than deferring).
[1] Technically, you could say you’re adopting the view that you should take some action but that seems confusing.
I think that’s an improvement though “delegating” sounds a bit formal and it’s usually the authority doing the delegating. Would “deferring on views” vs “deferring on decisions” get what you want?
No, that doesn’t work because epistemic deferring is also often about decisions, and in fact one of the key distinctions I want to make is when someone is deferring on a decision how that can be for epistemic or authority reasons, and how those look different.
I agree it’s slightly awkward that authorities often delegate, but I think that that’s usually delegating tasks; “delegating choices” to me has much less connotation of a high-status person delegating to a low-status person.
Although … one of the examples of “deferring to authority” in my sense is a boss deferring to the authority of a subordinate after the subordinate has been tasked with making a decision, even though the boss disagrees and has the power to override it. With this example, “delegating choice” has very much the right connotation, and “deferring to authority” feels a bit of a stretch.
Just to make sure I understand correctly is”delegating choice” is “delegating a choice (of an action to be made)” ?
If so, I think this is a much better phrase at least than deferring to authority, and would even propose editing the OP to suggest this as an alternative phrase / address this so that others don’t get the wrong impression—based on our conversation it seems we have more agreement than I would have guessed from reading the OP alone.
Related post to the importance of delegating choice, but that was not framed as a trade-off between buying into a thing vs doing it was Jan Kulveit’s What to do with people from a few years ago.
Thanks for writing this post. I think it’s really to distinguish the two types of deference and push the conversation toward the question of when to defer as opposed to how good it is in general.
ButI think “deferring to authority” is bad branding (as you worry about below) and I’m not sure your definition totally captures what you mean. I think it’s probably worth changing even though I haven’t come up with great alternatives.
Branding. To my ear, deferring to authority has a very negative connotation. It suggests deferring to a preexisting authority because they have power over you, not deferring to a person/norm/institution/process because you’re bought into the value of coordination. Relatedly, it doesn’t seem like the most natural phrase to capture a lot of your central examples.
Substantive definition. I don’t think “adopting someone else’s view because of a social contract to do so” is exactly what you mean. It suggests that if someone were not to defer in one of these cases, they’d be violating a social contract (or at least a norm or expectation), whereas I think you want to include lots of instances where that’s not the case (e.g. you might defer as a solution to the unilateralist’s curse even if you were under no implicit contract to do so). Most of your examples also seem to be more about acting based on someone else’s view or a norm/rule/process/institution and not really about adopting their view.[1] This seems important since I think you’re trying to create space for people to coordinate by acting against their own view while continuing to hold that view.
I actually think the epistemics v. action distinction is a cleaner distinction so I might base your categories just on whether you’re changing your views v. your actions (though I suspect you considered this and decided against).
***
Brainstorm of other names for non-epistemic deferring (none are great). Pragmatic deferring. Action deferring. Praxological deferring (eww). Deferring for coordination.
(I actually suspect that you might just want to call this something other than deferring).
[1] Technically, you could say you’re adopting the view that you should take some action but that seems confusing.
Perhaps “deferring on views” vs “delegating choices” ?
I think that’s an improvement though “delegating” sounds a bit formal and it’s usually the authority doing the delegating. Would “deferring on views” vs “deferring on decisions” get what you want?
No, that doesn’t work because epistemic deferring is also often about decisions, and in fact one of the key distinctions I want to make is when someone is deferring on a decision how that can be for epistemic or authority reasons, and how those look different.
I agree it’s slightly awkward that authorities often delegate, but I think that that’s usually delegating tasks; “delegating choices” to me has much less connotation of a high-status person delegating to a low-status person.
Although … one of the examples of “deferring to authority” in my sense is a boss deferring to the authority of a subordinate after the subordinate has been tasked with making a decision, even though the boss disagrees and has the power to override it. With this example, “delegating choice” has very much the right connotation, and “deferring to authority” feels a bit of a stretch.
Just to make sure I understand correctly is”delegating choice” is “delegating a choice (of an action to be made)” ?
If so, I think this is a much better phrase at least than deferring to authority, and would even propose editing the OP to suggest this as an alternative phrase / address this so that others don’t get the wrong impression—based on our conversation it seems we have more agreement than I would have guessed from reading the OP alone.
Yeah that does sell me a bit more on delegating choice.
Related post to the importance of delegating choice, but that was not framed as a trade-off between buying into a thing vs doing it was Jan Kulveit’s What to do with people from a few years ago.