Against Modesty’s Bailey

In a post on his blog Don't Worry About the Vase, Zvi Mowshowitz takes aim at what he calls 'Modesty's Bailey' – the notion that you should defer to expert consensus or higher-status thinkers. He argues that while you should treat others' opinions as evidence, you shouldn't automatically weight your own inside view less than theirs. He recounts an exchange where Eliezer Yudkowsky refused to consider certain AI researchers his epistemic peers, and notes that one of them, Leopold Aschenbrenner, later recanted by founding a hedge fund. Mowshowitz concludes that thinking for yourself is both a right and a moral duty.

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