One disagreement I have with Max is whether someone should defer is contingent upon the importance of a decision. I think this begs the question in that it pre-assumes that deference lead to the best outcomes.
Instead, I think you should act such that you all-things-considered-view is that you’re making the best decision. I do think that for many decisions (with the possible exception of creative work), some level of deference leads to better outcomes than zero deference at all, but I don’t think it’s unusually true for important decisions except inasmuch as a) the benefits (and also costs!) of deference are scaled accordingly and b) more people are likely to have thought about important decisions.
I’m not sure if we have a principled disagreement here, it’s possible that I just described my view badly above.
I agree that one should act such that one’s all-things-considered view is that one is making the best decision (the way I understand that statement it’s basically a tautology).
Then I think there are some heuristics for which features of a decision situation make it more or less likely that deferring more (or at all) leads to decisions with that property. I think on a high level I agree with you that it depends a lot “on the context of what this information is for”, more so than on e.g. importance.
With my example, I was also trying to point less to importance per se but on something like how the costs and benefits are distributed between yourself and others. This is because very loosely speaking I expect not deferring to often be better if the stakes are concentrated on oneself and more deference to be better if one’s own direct stake is small. I used a decision with large effects on others largely because then it’s not plausible that you yourself are affected by a similar amount; but it would also apply to a decision with zero effect on yourself and a small effect on others. Conversely, it would not apply to a decision that is very important to yourself (e.g. something affecting your whole career trajectory).
Apologies for the long delay in response, feel free to not reply if you’re busy.
Hmm I still think we have a substantive rather than framing disagreement (though I think it is likely that our disagreements aren’t large).
This is because very loosely speaking I expect not deferring to often be better if the stakes are concentrated on oneself and more deference to be better if one’s own direct stake is small. I used a decision with large effects on others largely because then it’s not plausible that you yourself are affected by a similar amount; but it would also apply to a decision with zero effect on yourself and a small effect on others. Conversely, it would not apply to a decision that is very important to yourself (e.g. something affecting your whole career trajectory).
Perhaps this heuristic is really useful for a lot of questions you’re considering. I’m reminded of AGB’s great quote:
There are enough individual and practical considerations here (in both directions) that in many situations the actual thing I would advocate for is something like “work out what you would do with both approaches, check against results ‘without fear or favour’, and move towards whatever method is working best for you”.
For me personally and the specific questions I’ve considered, I think considering whether/how much to defer to by dividing into buckets of “how much it affects myself or others” is certainly a pretty useful heuristic in the absence of better heuristics, but it’s mostly superseded by a different decomposition:
Epistemic—In a context-sensitive manner, do we expect greater or lower deference in this particular situation to lead to more accurate beliefs.
Role expectations* -- Whether the explicit and implicit social expectations on the role you’re assuming privilege deference or independence.
So I think a big/main reason it’s bad to defer completely to others (say 80k) on your own career reasons is epistemic: you have so much thought and local knowledge about your own situation that your prior should very strongly be against others having better all-things-considered views on your career choice than you do. I think this is more crux-y for me than how much your career trajectory affects yourself vs others (at any rate hopefully as EAs our career trajectories affect many others anyway!).
On the other hand, I think my Cochrane review example above is a good epistemic example of deference. even though my dental hygiene practices mainly affect myself and not others (perhaps my past and future partners may disagree), I contend it’s better to defer to the meta-analysis over my own independent analysis in this particular facet of my personal life.
The other main (non-epistemic) lens I’d use to privilege greater or lower humility is whether the explicit and implicit social expectations privilege deference or independence. For example, we’d generally** prefer government bureaucrats in most situations to implement policies, rather than making unprincipled exceptions based on private judgements. This will often look superficially similar to “how much this affects myself or others.”
An example of a dissimilarity is when someone filling out a survey. This is a situation where approximately all of the costs and benefits are borne by other people. So if you have a minority opinion on a topic, it may seem like the epistemically humble-and-correct action is to fill out the poll according to what you believe the majority to think (or alternatively, fill it out with the answer that you privately think is on the margin more conducive to advancing your values).
But in all likelihood, such a policy is one-thought-too-many, and in almost all situations it’d be more prudent to fill out public anonymous polls/surveys with what you actually believe.
I agree that one should act such that one’s all-things-considered view is that one is making the best decision (the way I understand that statement it’s basically a tautology).
Agreed, though I mention this because in discussions of epistemic humility-in-practice, it’s very easy to accidentally do double-counting.
*I don’t like this phrase, happy to use a better one.
**I’m aware that there are exceptions, including during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Thanks! I’m not sure if there is a significant difference about how we’d actually make decisions (I mean, on prior there is probably some difference). But I agree that the single heuristics I mentioned above doesn’t by itself do a great job of describing when and how much to defer, and I agree with your “counterexamples”. (Though note that in principle it’s not surprising if there are counterexamples to a “mere heuristics”.)
I particularly appreciate you describing the “Role expectations” point. I agree that something along those lines is important. My guess is that if we would have debated specific decisions I would have implicitly incorporated this consideration, but I don’t think it was clear to me before reading your comment that this is an important property that will often influence my judgment about how much to defer.
I’m not sure if we have a principled disagreement here, it’s possible that I just described my view badly above.
I agree that one should act such that one’s all-things-considered view is that one is making the best decision (the way I understand that statement it’s basically a tautology).
Then I think there are some heuristics for which features of a decision situation make it more or less likely that deferring more (or at all) leads to decisions with that property. I think on a high level I agree with you that it depends a lot “on the context of what this information is for”, more so than on e.g. importance.
With my example, I was also trying to point less to importance per se but on something like how the costs and benefits are distributed between yourself and others. This is because very loosely speaking I expect not deferring to often be better if the stakes are concentrated on oneself and more deference to be better if one’s own direct stake is small. I used a decision with large effects on others largely because then it’s not plausible that you yourself are affected by a similar amount; but it would also apply to a decision with zero effect on yourself and a small effect on others. Conversely, it would not apply to a decision that is very important to yourself (e.g. something affecting your whole career trajectory).
Apologies for the long delay in response, feel free to not reply if you’re busy.
Hmm I still think we have a substantive rather than framing disagreement (though I think it is likely that our disagreements aren’t large).
Perhaps this heuristic is really useful for a lot of questions you’re considering. I’m reminded of AGB’s great quote:
For me personally and the specific questions I’ve considered, I think considering whether/how much to defer to by dividing into buckets of “how much it affects myself or others” is certainly a pretty useful heuristic in the absence of better heuristics, but it’s mostly superseded by a different decomposition:
Epistemic—In a context-sensitive manner, do we expect greater or lower deference in this particular situation to lead to more accurate beliefs.
Role expectations* -- Whether the explicit and implicit social expectations on the role you’re assuming privilege deference or independence.
So I think a big/main reason it’s bad to defer completely to others (say 80k) on your own career reasons is epistemic: you have so much thought and local knowledge about your own situation that your prior should very strongly be against others having better all-things-considered views on your career choice than you do. I think this is more crux-y for me than how much your career trajectory affects yourself vs others (at any rate hopefully as EAs our career trajectories affect many others anyway!).
On the other hand, I think my Cochrane review example above is a good epistemic example of deference. even though my dental hygiene practices mainly affect myself and not others (perhaps my past and future partners may disagree), I contend it’s better to defer to the meta-analysis over my own independent analysis in this particular facet of my personal life.
The other main (non-epistemic) lens I’d use to privilege greater or lower humility is whether the explicit and implicit social expectations privilege deference or independence. For example, we’d generally** prefer government bureaucrats in most situations to implement policies, rather than making unprincipled exceptions based on private judgements. This will often look superficially similar to “how much this affects myself or others.”
An example of a dissimilarity is when someone filling out a survey. This is a situation where approximately all of the costs and benefits are borne by other people. So if you have a minority opinion on a topic, it may seem like the epistemically humble-and-correct action is to fill out the poll according to what you believe the majority to think (or alternatively, fill it out with the answer that you privately think is on the margin more conducive to advancing your values).
But in all likelihood, such a policy is one-thought-too-many, and in almost all situations it’d be more prudent to fill out public anonymous polls/surveys with what you actually believe.
Agreed, though I mention this because in discussions of epistemic humility-in-practice, it’s very easy to accidentally do double-counting.
*I don’t like this phrase, happy to use a better one.
**I’m aware that there are exceptions, including during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Thanks! I’m not sure if there is a significant difference about how we’d actually make decisions (I mean, on prior there is probably some difference). But I agree that the single heuristics I mentioned above doesn’t by itself do a great job of describing when and how much to defer, and I agree with your “counterexamples”. (Though note that in principle it’s not surprising if there are counterexamples to a “mere heuristics”.)
I particularly appreciate you describing the “Role expectations” point. I agree that something along those lines is important. My guess is that if we would have debated specific decisions I would have implicitly incorporated this consideration, but I don’t think it was clear to me before reading your comment that this is an important property that will often influence my judgment about how much to defer.