Some further elaboration along these lines:

I make all kinds of weird trades, because I can look at the fundamentals and the tradeoffs involved and see if they make sense.

Things like cryonics, or blueblockers, buying bitcoin in 2014, or taking microcovid risks. https://twitter.com/EpistemicHope/status/1356241233794895872

In contrast, my mom basically doesn't do this. For the most part she makes decisions along heuristic lines, where there's an important heuristic of staying within the social mainline.

Lots of ideas get rejected not because of the arguments, but because they never get as far as having the type signature "something that I could actually do."

One reason why that approach might be adaptive is that doing the "assess the fundamentals" thing depends on having a good deal of intelligence and analytical skill.

If you're bad at assessing arguments, you're likely going to shoot yourself in the foot by deviating from the social mainline.

(Not in the least because there are people and entities who are trying to exploit you, and who will easily out-argue you if you rely on arguments.)

But here's another reason why that attitude might make sense, even if it appears to leave (in some cases) really big gains on the table:

It requires orienting to the world in such a way that you treat your beliefs as some separate node that can vary.

You have to have a sense of your world view as a thing that can change. You have to have a sense that the map is not the teritorry.

For instance, I was thinking about the radvac vaccine, and what it would mean if it is low-risk and high efficacy. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/niQ3heWwF6SydhS7R/making-vaccine

And how my parents would update, if that turned out to be true.

I think that if I, were in their epistemic position, that should be a world-view shattering datum. I would be surprised, and follow up, because it suggests that something is wrong with my background assumptions about authority and civilizational adequacy.

(Though I have to be careful making that claim, because from the inside of a worldview, which data should be world-shattering is a much more ambiguous question, and I am likely to fail to make the correct update, despite my best efforts and the systems I've built...

...to notice and react to the things that should cause me to massively reorient.)

But my parents wouldn't make that update, not just because they don't have those skills and systems, but because of something more fundamental.

They don't realize (I think) that their sense of the trustworthiness of authorities is a belief that is part of the map. It just feels like the way the world is.

It isn't taken as object.

https://twitter.com/EpistemicHope/status/1320877320601620480

And taking that sort of thing as object is a pretty fundamental shift in how one orients to the world.

(Which isn't to say that it is a binary switch. I'm sure that there is a hell of a lot that I'm still enmeshed in, that I've not yet recognizing as part of my map.)

And a shift in orientation that fundamental probably comes with costs.

It might be worth it for ME, to have an orientation that takes my beliefs as object, but I have a lot of weird properties.

For most people, being this way might be, for instance, disorienting, or lonely.

Or, in general, inconsistent with living a good life.

The way I'm talking about it makes it seem like "oh well, there's a skill gap, and if you don't have some compliment of skills, taking your map as object will cause problems. But if you learn the skills to make it work, then taking-as-object is clearly better."

And yeah, that is my default assumption.

But I want to try and stretch it further. What if this orientation to one's map is, for some people, fundamental to a meaningful life?

What if talking about a skill gap is like talking about the skill gap of of non-attachment?

Like, I think we can train ourselves not care at all about outcomes in the external world, accepting all of it as equally good.

That people don't do this already is merely a matter of insufficient skill. If they learn the skills, then they won't have an problems with not caring about anything.

But many of us express horror at that thought. Wireheading!

We want to care about things. That's pretty fundamental to what is valuable in life.

Is it possible that my parents becoming like me with regards to orientation to one's beliefs, is like my coming to not care about events in the external world?

It seems to me that the answer is "no", but there's something here that I want to develop.