Egocentric epistemics: underdeference and underengagement

When others disagree with us, we often have reason to update our beliefs in their direction. We should defer to our epistemic peers (and superiors). And yet we often fail to do so to the extent that we should. We suffer from egocentric discounting: we put too much emphasis on our own inside views relative to the views of others. This has been much discussed.

But there’s a related tendency that’s not discussed as much (as far as I can tell, but correct me if I’m wrong), namely our tendency not to engage with the ideas of others. (Though see Robin Hanson.) In conversation, we’re often faced with the choice between making some claim of our own, and reacting (critically or otherwise) to a claim of our interlocutor’s. It seems to me that people too often choose the former option. Many conversations are effectively “duologues”, where people take turns at having monologues that are only vaguely related to each other. They’re “waiting to speak” about the things that interest them, and don’t listen very carefully to what the other person has to say.

This tendency is arguably even worse at the macro level than at the level of in-person conversations. Consider, for instance, how much time is put into writing scientific papers relative to how much time is put into evaluating them (by peer reviewers). While it’s true that the distinction between positive claims and critical evaluation of the claims of others isn’t crisp (for instance, scientific papers often include critical parts), my sense is that there’s an underprovision of the latter relative to the former. 

Moreover, when people do give criticisms, they often go unanswered, as Robin Hanson points out in a post on a book arguing automation won’t be as quick as some believe:

But looking over dozens of reviews Mindell’s book in the 75 days since it was published, I find no thoughtful response from the other side! None. No one who expects rapid automation progress has bothered to even outline why they find Mindell’s arguments unpersuasive.

I agree with Hanson that this is common. It seems that there’s a pattern: we underdefer to and underengage with the views of others. We put too much credence in our own views, and we are too inclined to make claims of our own relative to evaluating those of others. We suffer from egocentric epistemics, as it were. Is this pattern a coincidence, or is there a common explanation?

One hypothesis is that we fail to engage with the views of others precisely because we undervalue them. If you think that an idea is bad, you might think it’s better to give a suggestion of your own, instead of trying to evaluate it. 

Another explanation goes in the opposite direction. It would have two steps. First, it would say that the reason people don’t engage more with the views of others is that the reputational benefits of doing so are muted. That might, in turn, be because the social value of positive claims is more direct and salient than the social value of evaluating the claims of others. (Cf. that people often prefer charities whose impact is direct and salient over charities with an indirect impact—such as charity evaluators.) Also, criticisms may lead to resentment (among the targets of the criticism) in a way positive claims don’t. (Though that only explains underprovision of negative evaluations, not underprovision of positive or neutral evaluations.) Lastly, omitting to respond to criticisms can be reputationally cheap, since such omissions don’t tend to be very salient, and since each individual omission may appear justifiable (you might not have had time).

In a second step, this explanation would say that putting extra weight on your inside view allows you to make more positive claims. In conversation, there’s a presumption that we should make claims that are relevant (cf. Grice and Sperber & Wilson), and one aspect of relevance is novelty. Deferring to the community consensus makes your beliefs less novel—and that, in turn, decreases your ability to make novel positive claims in conversation. Therefore, we are, according to this explanation, incentivised to put extra weight on our own inside views.

However, neither of these explanations seems obviously right to me. Pace the first explanation, we are sometimes especially inclined to criticise views that we find bad; we don’t necessarily just ignore them. And the second explanation has many steps, potentially making it brittle and fragile.

Nevertheless, if people both underdefer to and underenage with the views of others then I think that might not be a coincidence. It seems plausible that there’s some kind of connection between the two aspects of egocentric epistemics, whatever the merits of the explanations I’ve discussed. If so, that could potentially be used as a heuristic when evaluating explanations of each individual phenomenon (see this article for an overview of explanations of underdeference).