I think that religious leaders claim to be humble before God, and then turn around and distribute claims about his will to everyone else.
So it seems like they're acting in deference, but they're acting in deference towards someone they never interact with, while expecting others to defer to them.
Today's post, The Proper Use of Humility was originally published on 1 December 2006. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was ...What's a bias, again? and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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