Your independent impression about something is essentially what you'd believe about that thing if you weren't updating your beliefs in light of peer disagreement - i.e., if you weren't taking into account your knowledge about what other people believe and how trustworthy their judgement seems on this topic. Your independent impression can take into account the reasons those people have for their beliefs (inasmuch as you know those reasons), but not the mere fact that they believe what they believe.
Meanwhile, your all-things-considered belief can (and probably should!) also take into account peer disagreement.
Armed with this concept, I try to stick to the following epistemic/discussion norms, and I think it's good for other people to do so as well:
- I try to keep track of my own independent impressions separately from my all-things-considered beliefs
- I try to feel comfortable reporting my own independent impression, even when I know it differs from the impressions of people with more expertise in a topic
- I try to be clear about whether, in a given moment, I'm reporting my independent impression or my all-things-considered belief
One rationale for that bundle of norms is to avoid information cascades.
In contrast, when I actually make decisions, I try to always make them based on my all-things-considered beliefs.
For example: My independent impression is that it's plausible that an unrecoverable dystopia is more likely than extinction and that we should prioritise such risks more than we currently do. But this opinion seems relatively uncommon among people who've thought a lot about existential risks. That observation pushes my all-things-considered belief somewhat away from my independent impression and towards what most of those people seem to think. And this all-things-considered belief is what guides my research and career decisions. But I think it's still useful for me to keep track of my independent impression and report it sometimes, or else communities I'm part of might end up with overly certain and homogenous beliefs.
This term, this concept, and these suggested norms aren't at all original to me - see in particular Naming beliefs, this comment, and several of the posts tagged Epistemic humility (especially this one). But I wanted a clear, concise description of this specific set of terms and norms so that I could link to it whenever I say I'm reporting my independent impression, ask someone for theirs, or ask someone whether an opinion they've given is their independent impression or their all-things-considered belief.
My thanks to Lukas Finnveden for suggesting I make this a top-level post (it was originally a shortform).
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A few arguments for letting your independent impression guide your research and career decisions instead:
IMO, good rules of thumb are:
I agree with your second and third arguments and your two rules of thumb. (And I thought about those second and third arguments when posting this and felt tempted to note them, but ultimately decided to not in order to keep this more concise and keep chugging with my other work. So I'm glad you raised them in your comment.)
I partially disagree with your first argument, for three main reasons:
(I wrote this comment quickly, and this is a big and complex topic where much more could be said. I really don't want readers to round this off as me saying something like "Everyone should just do what 80,000 Hours says without thinking or questioning it".)
Good points.
It's not enough to just track the uncertainty, you also have to have visibility into current resource allocation. The "defer if there's an incentive to do so" idea helps here, because if there's an incentive, that suggests someone with such visibility thinks there is an under-allocation.