Scott writes on what he calls getting Eulered: when someone tries to convince you of something or rebut something you believe using arguments (particularly mathematical ones) you are either not intelligent or not trained enough to understand.

I’ve never heard the term before, but I’ve thought of this. I am intelligent, but not exceedingly so, there are a number of things I won’t be able to understand, at least not fully or without much more effort and time than I am willing to put in.

So, I follow a simple heuristic: what does someone smarter than me who agrees with me on things I understand and is willing to put in time/effort think on the issue?

If you know he agrees with you on the things you understand for similar reasons as you, you know he reasons in similar fashion to you from similar presupoositions. If he reasons in a similar fashion as you, you then know that his thoughts on another issue you don’t understand will be the most reasonable approximation of what you would think if you were either smart or knowledgeable enough to be able to form an informed opinion on the matter.

No matter how smart you are you can’t know or understand all things. In the case where you can’t, the wise course of action is to fall back on those who think the same as you, but are either more intelligent or more knowledgeable on the subject matter.

All rational organizations outsource when it’s more efficient, so why not outsource your thinking when it is more likely to be correct if someone else does it for you?

Agreeing with someone because he generally agrees with you when you don’t understand the argument in question is usually the most rational form of action.

Of course, this is not an original heuristic, and is no different than asking, ‘what does my father, my priest, my teacher, etc. say?‘

But what if you move your intellectual outsourcing beyond a known individual to something greater. This is where tradition comes in: why outsource your thinking to a single individual when you can outsource your thinking to the collective reasoning of every single previously-existing mind of your society?

Is it not much more efficient and wise to follow the collective wisdom of thousands of minds much more intelligent and knowledgeable than yourself than to go through the intellectual labour of thinking something through for yourself and likely arriving at a rationally inferior position?

From this, is not the person saying, “I believe what my ancestors, the magisterium, my intellectual forebears believe” being more rational than the one who tries to reason everything out for himself?

Maybe, argument from authority, if the authority stands firmly upon a mount of tradition, is the most rational argument of all.