Adam Elga

defer to what your prior self would have thought.

So here's a case.

You come in, you encounter the big disagreement.

And then imagine getting on the time travel phone with your past self.

And you ask your past self, hey, suppose this were to happen.

Suppose you were to find out that you and this person were to disagree in such and such way.

We can't, in the phone, we don't specify the full story about all the evidence and all the arguments because

Then we'd just be reproducing the original problem.

But you give enough, you know, they say something that strikes me as totally wacko.

They say a certain kind of coarse characterization.

And then we ask that past version of yourself, what would you think conditional on that?

You know, if that were to happen, how likely do you think it would be that you're the one who's right versus them?

And my feeling is you should defer to that person.

And the reason why this doesn't immediately amount to a total, like, wishy-washiness in the face of everyone believing everything and just giving up your entire worldview and just becoming a kind of big averaging machine is that, in fact, in many cases, many of us are wrong.

rather non even handed in our answers to those questions.

You'd think, what would you think if so-and-so thought blah, blah, blah.

And often the answer is, wow, you know, even though I would say like in polite company, I would say that person's smart and I can't point to any encyclopedias that I've read that they haven't read.

But I really am honest and think, what would I say if I found this person discreet?

I would think, you know, I guess I'd think they're probably wrong.

And the version of the equal weight view, which is what this side of the view is sometimes called, the version that I like best is the one that defers to your past self in that way.