The true outside view

[epistemic status: strong opinions weakly held, not very original]

The false outside view says that if you have a contrarian inside view, you’re probably wrong, so you should not act like you’re correct. The false outside view is driven by intuitions about social status and/or fear of being wrong.

The true outside view says that a great deal of good comes from contrarians pushing on their contrarian inside views (acting on them, talking about them with others, etc), so if you have one of those you should maybe do that, while additionally taking others’ perspectives seriously, testing your ideas often, being honest, avoiding some potentially-catastrophic unilateral actions, etc.

The true outside view follows from any halfway-decent decision theory (something like “updateless decision theory for humans”, as gestured at before. This decision theory might look “epistemically modest” sometimes and “epistemically arrogant” other times, but these descriptions impose ego on something that by construction doesn’t have an ego.