A lot of my peers are brilliant people and they know more than I do about a wide range of topics. I want to copy their beliefs a lot of the time when I don’t ha

A lot of my peers are brilliant people and they know more than I do about a wide range of topics. I want to copy their beliefs a lot of the time when I don’t have special evidence to have my own view. This post’s advice is extremely bad because it forces some level of optimizing for uniqueness (very ironic this is related to Thiel’s question too, since it plays right into Girard-style mimetic fighting to differentiate one’s self from otherwise highly similar peers). But uniqueness is not valuable in a vacuum. You actually need the unusual views to be correct and valuable in some way. Merely creating some spark of uniqueness is pretty useless and often harmful. If someone said to me that inside their field of experience (life, or professional or otherwise), they have sufficient reason to have an unusual belief, but for everything else they either copy another expert they trust or else default to conventional wisdom, that would impress me. If someone goes out of their way to hold unusual beliefs in areas where there is no reason to believe their judgement, that’s a sign of reckless beliefs and immature virtue signaling.