Epistemic deference is the process of updating one's beliefs in response to what others appear to believe, even if one ignores the reasons for those beliefs or does not find those reasons persuasive. The question of when, how, and to what extent a rational agent should defer to others has been studied—from somewhat different angles—by philosophers working in social epistemology and by economists working in game theory.

Further reading

Aird, Michael (2020) Collection of discussions of epistemic modesty, “rationalist*EA exceptionalism”, and similar, LessWrong, March 30.
Many additional resources on this topic or related topics.

LessWrong (2021) Modest epistemology, LessWrong Wiki, April 7.

Frances, Bryan & Jonathan Matheson (2018) Disagreement, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, February 23 (updated 13 November 2019).

Huemer, Michael (2019) On challenging the experts, Fake Nous, July 6.

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