Some are paralyzed for more sophisticated reasons. When you've repeatedly noticed that people who don't take the time to meta-optimize decisions, think through potential negative consequences, actually care about being right or doing the right thing, et cetera, tend to end up doing extremely abhorrent things while remaining self-righteous, and then furthermore notice that when you try to emulate this behavior bad things tend to happen not only to the people you care about but yourself and others' perceptions of you, then you start getting major inhibitions about trying to do anything that has multiple steps, high uncertainty about utility, or that could set a bad precedent for future action.
The safe assumption is that the brain cannot distinguish between unimportant decisions in near mode and important decisions in far mode. Both tend to have similar amounts of perceived utility. If a lot of what you do involves careful thinking about far mode topics (Friendly AI, cosmology, decision theory, philosophy, epistemic rationality), then making hasty decisions in near mode could set a bad precedent for far mode epistemic dispositions. We just don't know how context-sensitively the brain is wired. I personally would not bet heavily on the hypothesis that the brain is that context-sensitive about dispositions of judgment.
I repeatedly perceive anticorrelation between epistemic and "instrumental rationality" (that is, doing things because doing things is high status, even if they're probably not the right things to do). Until I understand this better, I am going to go with my comparative advantage and genetic predisposition to being somewhat paralyzed when it comes to decisions and getting things done, while being very afraid of precedents and hasty decisions (including hasty decisions about which ideas to endorse).
The constant negative feedback of "this isn't working, try something else" is not something I want to get rid of. Not as long as I have something to protect.
Speaking of bad precedents, LW is the only community I know of where it's high-status to brag about not being able to do anything.
During a discussion today about the bizarre "can't get crap done" phenomenon that afflicts large fractions of our community, the suggestion came up that most people can't do anything where there is a perceived choice that includes the null option / "do nothing" as an option. Of which Michael Vassar made the following observation:
And if you're not the leader, it is not good for your reproductive fitness to act like one. In modern times the penalties for standing up are much lower, but our instincts haven't updated.
Interesting to reconsider the events of "To lead, you must stand up" in this light. It makes more sense if you read it as "None of those people had instincts saying it was a good idea to declare themselves the leader of the monkey tribe, in order to solve this particular coordination problem where 'do nothing' felt like a viable option" instead of "nobody had the initiative".