Deferral is a skill

(issue?)

Not everyone needs to be a researcher. But “not being a researcher” doesn’t mean “not thinking for yourself”.

I think the skill involved in “secondary research” / “deferring well” / [whatever the right label is, part of the problem might be a lack of a good label] is frequently underrated.

It’s easy to carve people up into “thinkers who can and should develop inside views” or “people who defer.” But the second camp is massive and heterogeneous; many tasks/jobs/roles involve “just” deferring in the sense that nearly all of the relevant facts/theories/ideas don’t need to be generated de novo by the person doing the job, but where the skill+effort that gets put into trying to form true beliefs is still pretty much the whole ball game.

• Often, especially in small/new fields, there isn’t a consensus you can just identify and defer to

• Even when there is a consensus on a specific question, there’s a big gap between “defer to the consensus” and “understand what the consensus actually implies for the decision you’re actually facing”

• If the plan is to defer to a specific expert on something, how good you are at extracting relevant info from them matters a lot: are you asking good questions, do you need things explained twice, can you work out what to ask them vs. find out yourself?

  • This matters because experts in a subject area aren’t always experts at explaining stuff

  • And because how easy it is for the experts to convey what they need to to you affects how much future facetime you’ll get.

• Even the literal best thinker in the world on topic X isn’t necessarily going to be that hard to beat at making a specific decision where topic X is relevant but not the entire story, especially if they only have a moment to think about it.

This is especially tricky in fields like AI safety and governance, where the experts genuinely disagree, the field is moving fast, and the “consensus view” on many important questions just doesn’t exist. You can’t defer to a consensus that isn’t there.

I had to do a lot of [this thing, where I’m trying really hard to work out what’s true and what I actually think, but not “doing novel research”] both as an advisor at 80k and now as a grantmaker. In both jobs it wasn’t my role to produce new knowledge, but there was still a huge amount of original thinking required. The decisions I face (”what should this person/org do?”) involve deep understanding of areas where I’m not an expert, meaning that relying on others’ expertise is extremely important. It’s almost never the case that I can just ask the relevant expert the answer to the actual question I’m facing.

I need to understand something close to cutting-edge knowledge, but don’t need to produce it. Instead I need to quickly work out which things are relevant to my decision, get to the truth of them (often by asking), work out how much variation in belief exists among genuine experts, and how sensitive the decision is to that variation etc.

Whether you can think of a better label for the thing I’m trying to describe, or just want to call it “deferring, but, like, the high skill kind of deferring”, don’t underrate it, in yourself or others.