Deference and Delegation

A philosophical and mathematical exploration of when and how to defer to experts. The first two posts develop an intuitive framework based on a simple idea: you should defer to someone when you'd prefer them to make decisions on your behalf. This leads naturally to a theory of both global and local deference that handles modest experts while connecting to accuracy and decision theory. The final post provides the mathematical foundations for readers interested in the technical details.  Much of this sequence is an informal presentation of ideas in this paper.