Building your own world model is hard work. It can be good intellectual fun, sometimes, but it’s often more fun to just plug into the crowd around you and borrow their collective world model for your decision making. Why risk embarrassing yourself going off and doing weird things on your own initiative when you can just defer to higher-status people. No one ever gets blamed for deferring to the highest-status people!
Because people generally follow the path of least resistance in life, people with world models that have actually been tested against and updated on observations of the world are valuable! Thinking for yourself makes you valuable in this world!
Building your own world model is hard work. It can be good intellectual fun, sometimes, but it’s often more fun to just plug into the crowd around you and borrow their collective world model for your decision making. Why risk embarrassing yourself going off and doing weird things on your own initiative when you can just defer to higher-status people. No one ever gets blamed for deferring to the highest-status people!
(Though perhaps not being blamed is not what you’re trying to protect…)
Because people generally follow the path of least resistance in life, people with world models that have actually been tested against and updated on observations of the world are valuable! Thinking for yourself makes you valuable in this world!