welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio. this is: Some thoughts on deference and inside-view models, published by Buck on the effective altruism forum. Write a Review TL;DR: It's sometimes reasonable to believe things based on heuristic arguments, but it's useful to be clear with yourself about when you believe things for heuristic reasons as opposed to having strong arguments that take you all the way to your conclusion. A lot of the time, I think that when you hear a heuristic argument for something, you should be interested in converting this into the form of an argument which would take you all the way to the conclusion except that you haven't done a bunch of the steps--I think it's healthy to have a map of all the argumentative steps which you haven't done, or which you're taking on faith. I think that all the above can be combined to form a set of attitudes which are healthy on both an individual and community level. For example, one way that our community could be unhealthy would be if people felt inhibited to say when they don't feel persuaded by arguments. But another unhealthy culture would be if we acted like you're a chump if you believe things just because people who you trust and respect believe them. We should have a culture where it's okay to act on arguments without having verified every step for yourself, and you can express confusion about individual steps without that being an act of rebellion against the conclusion of those arguments. I wrote this post to describe the philosophy behind the schedule of a workshop that I ran in February. The workshop is kind of like AIRCS, but aimed at people who are more hardcore EAs, less focused on CS people, and with a culture which is a bit less like MIRI and more like the culture of other longtermist EAs. Thanks to the dozens of people who I've talked to about these concepts for their useful comments; thanks also to various people who read this doc for their criticism. Many of these ideas came from conversations with a variety of EAs, in particular Claire Zabel, Anna Salamon, other staff of AIRCS workshops, and the staff of the workshop I’m going to run. I think this post isn't really insightful enough or well-argued enough to justify how expansive it is. I posted it anyway because it seemed better than not doing so, and because I thought it would be useful to articulate these claims even if I don't do a very good job of arguing for them. I tried to write the following without caveating every sentence with "I think" or "It seems", even though I wanted to. I am pretty confident that the ideas I describe here are a healthy way for me to relate to thinking about EA stuff; I think that these ideas are fairly likely to be a useful lens for other people to take; I am less confident but think it's plausible that I'm describing ways that the EA community could be different that would be very helpful. Part 1: ways of thinking Proofs vs proof sketches When I first heard about AI safety, I was convinced that AI safety technical research was useful by an argument that was something like "superintelligence would be a big deal; it's not clear how to pick a good goal for a superintelligence to maximize, so maybe it's valuable to try to figure that out." In hindsight this argument was making a bunch of hidden assumptions. For example, here are three objections: It's less clear that superintelligence can lead to extinction if you think that AI systems will increase in power gradually, and before we have AI systems which are as capable of the whole of humanity we have AI systems which are as capable as dozens of humans. Maybe some other crazy thing (whole brain emulation, nanotech, technology-enabled totalitarianism) is likely to happen before superintelligence, which would make working on AI safety seem worse in a bunch of ways Maybe it's really hard to work on technical AI ...