12 Comments

In my experience, you are right about people preferring loyalty to truth. When I ask intelligent, thoughtful people for facts to back up their statements, they often become offended, perhaps because I'm being disloyal by not believing them. Likewise, when arguing over gender politics, I have been told by people I know, "All women have had X experience." When I say, "I'm a woman, and I haven't." I am often told that my experience as a woman is inauthentic or that I am mistaken.

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It's pure tribalism. People (and societies) are more likely to survive when they are loyal to the tribe than if they are right.

Twitter shaming is cheap value-signaling. It takes almost zero effort to join the bandwagon. Disagreeing leads to problems.

In my life, it's also why some friends must choose sides after a divorce. If a person isn't loyal, they become an enemy.

Thank you Robin, for not bowing down to the lowest common denominator.

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The paper's behind a paywall so I can't tell, but this summary got me curious about the how big the expected impact of B's moral character on the subject's welfare must become before the subject will start paying attention to gossip-trustworthiness indicators.

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Hmm. Perhaps I'm just an extreme skeptic. I never consider anyone's opinion of food I haven't yet tried to be any indication that I would like the food myself. And same with people, and movies, and books.

I always figure I'll just have to find out myself. Maybe it's because my tastes and opinions have always been unique. But I do think more people should live like I do in this regard.

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I think that the less familiar you are with chocolate, the more weight A's opinion would have. If you already know that chocolate is your favorite/least favorite food, it won't matter much. I often read movie reviews in part to decide which movies I'm likely to enjoy seeing, and critics have an advantage there in that films are screened early for them (it's also their job to see & review things even if they don't expect to enjoy them). A film with a 0% Rotten Tomatoes score is one I'm likely to avoid, but that would be an example of many different people all saying the same thing.

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If A said, "I like chocolate," would that give you any information whatsoever about chocolate? Not really. A's opinion of chocolate tells you nothing about what you yourself might think about chocolate, except in the narrow case that A's tastes generally reflect your own.

Similarly with people. If John says, "I don't like George," that doesn't tell me anything about George, except in the narrow case that John and I generally feel the same way about people.

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More reasonable to say that A is a contrary indicator, such that you should dislike folks that A likes.

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That could increase accuracy. But I worry less about jury accuracy than a lack of demand for accurate jury verdicts.

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Specifically, I was thinking of this paper:http://johnbullock.org/pape...

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Isn't there research showing people are more likely to value accuracy if you provide even a modest monetary incentive to do so? Maybe two independent juries could be provided an additional monetary incentive if their results match.

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Hanson never said that you should adopt A's opinion as your own. He only mentions that you now have at least some minor evidence, no matter how slight, in the "direction" of A's claim.

For this to be false, you would need to be asserting that A's statement provides you with *zero* information about B, which seems like a highly unreasonable assumption.

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Imagine that person A tells you something flattering or unflattering about person B. All else equal, this should move your opinion of B in the direction of A’s claim.

Should it? There are very few people in the world whose opinions I trust as though they were my own. When A says something about B, that only gives me insight into A's relationship to B; it doesn't affect my opinion of B unless ceteris isn't paribus.

Now, I may have incentive to take sides between A and B, depending on my loyalty commitments to both of them. But I don't think it's quite accurate to say that, all things being equal, any old thing A says about B moves my opinion of B in that direction.

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