The idea is that you don’t, in general, have fully articulated proofs of the question in hand, and you’re relying on some combination of heuristics to come to your conclusion.
If you’re allowed to hear other peoples answers, and a bit about the people making them, then you have a set of heuristics and answers, and you have to guess what the real answer is based on these. If you stick with your original answer, you’re arbitrarily picking one heuristic to trust completely, which is clearly suboptimal.
You want to discount like minded thinking (many people, one heuristic), weigh more heavily peoples views that you know were reached by thinking about the problem in different ways (again, weight the heuristic, not the person), and of course, more heavily weight heuristics that you expect to work. It’s how to do this last part that we’re talking about.
High G people may have access to more complex heuristics that most could not come up with, but what’s more important is having your heuristic free of errors that prevent its functioning. Knowing what a heuristic has to do in order to work is more important than having a lot of cognitive horsepower spent on coming up with fancy heuristics without a solid reason.
Of course, in the end, if you spot a glaring error in someone’s thinking, you don’t trust him, even if he’s an ‘authority’ (in other words: even if he has a track record of producing good heuristics, you condition on this one being bad and don’t trust the output). And of course, the deeper into the object level you are able to dive, the more information you have on which to judge the credibility of heuristics.
Perhaps it has better connotations whens stated as “Aumann agreement”?
There’s a place for “argument from authority”.
The idea is that you don’t, in general, have fully articulated proofs of the question in hand, and you’re relying on some combination of heuristics to come to your conclusion.
If you’re allowed to hear other peoples answers, and a bit about the people making them, then you have a set of heuristics and answers, and you have to guess what the real answer is based on these. If you stick with your original answer, you’re arbitrarily picking one heuristic to trust completely, which is clearly suboptimal.
You want to discount like minded thinking (many people, one heuristic), weigh more heavily peoples views that you know were reached by thinking about the problem in different ways (again, weight the heuristic, not the person), and of course, more heavily weight heuristics that you expect to work. It’s how to do this last part that we’re talking about.
High G people may have access to more complex heuristics that most could not come up with, but what’s more important is having your heuristic free of errors that prevent its functioning. Knowing what a heuristic has to do in order to work is more important than having a lot of cognitive horsepower spent on coming up with fancy heuristics without a solid reason.
Of course, in the end, if you spot a glaring error in someone’s thinking, you don’t trust him, even if he’s an ‘authority’ (in other words: even if he has a track record of producing good heuristics, you condition on this one being bad and don’t trust the output). And of course, the deeper into the object level you are able to dive, the more information you have on which to judge the credibility of heuristics.
Perhaps it has better connotations whens stated as “Aumann agreement”?