Smart Sincere Contrarian Trap

We talk as if we pick our beliefs mainly for accuracy, but in fact we have many social motives for picking beliefs. In particular, we use many kinds of beliefs as group affiliation/conformity signals. Some of us also use a few contrarian beliefs to signal cleverness and independence, but our groups have a limited tolerance for such things.

We can sometimes win socially by joining impressive leaders with the right sort of allies who support new fashions contrary to the main current beliefs. If enough others also join these new beliefs, they can become the new main beliefs of our larger group. At that point, those who continue to oppose them become the contrarians, and those who adopted the new fashions as they were gaining momentum gain more relative to latecomers. (Those who adopt fashions too early also tend to lose.)

As we are embarrassed if we seem to pick beliefs for any reason other than accuracy, this sort of new fashion move works better when supported by good accuracy-oriented reasons for changing to the new beliefs. This produces a weak tendency, all else equal, for group-based beliefs to get more accurate over time. However, many of our beliefs are about what actions are effective at achieving the motives we claim to have. And we are often hypocritical about our motives. Because of this, workable fashion moves need not just good reasons to belief claims about the efficacy of actions for stated motives, but also enough of a correspondence between the outcomes of those actions and our actual motives. Many possible fashion moves are unworkable because we don’t actually want to pursue the motives we proclaim.

Smarter people are better able to identify beliefs better supported by reasons, which all else equal makes those beliefs better candidates for new fashions. So those with enough status to start a new fashion may want to listen to smart people in the habit of looking for such candidates. But reasonably smart people who put in the effort are capable of finding a great many places where there are good reasons for picking a non-status-quo belief. And if they also happen to be sincere, they tend to visibly support many of those contrarian beliefs, even in the absence of supporting fashion movements with a decent chance of success. Which results in such high-effort smart sincere people sending bad group affiliation/conformity signals. So while potential leaders of new fashions want to listen to such people, they don’t want to publicly affiliate with them.

I fell into this smart sincere conformity trap long ago. I’ve studied many different areas, and when I’ve discovered an alternate belief that seems to have better supporting reasons than a usual belief, I have usually not hesitated to publicly embrace it. People have told me that it would have been okay for me to publicly embrace one contrarian belief. I might then have had enough overall status to plausibly lead that as a new fashion. But the problem is that I’ve supported many contrarian beliefs, not all derived from a common core principle. And so I’m not a good candidate to be a leader for any of my groups or contrarian views.

Which flags me as a smart sincere person. Good to listen to behind the scenes to get ideas for possible new fashions, but bad to embrace publicly as a loyal group member. I might gain if my contrarian views eventually became winning new fashions, but my early visible adoption of those views probably discourages others from trying to lead them, as they can less claim to have been first with those views.

If the only people who visibly supported contrarian views were smart sincere people who put in high effort, then such views might become known for high accuracy. This wouldn’t necessarily induce most people to adopt them, but it would help. However, there seem to be enough people who visibly adopt contrarian views for others reasons to sufficiently muddy the waters.

If prediction markets were widely adopted, the visible signals of which beliefs were more accurate would tend to embarrass more people into adopting them. Such people do not relish this prospect, as it would have them send bad group affiliation signals. Smart sincere people might relish the prospect, but there are not enough of them to make a difference, and even the few there are mostly don’t seem to relish it enough to work to get prediction markets adopted. Sincerely holding a belief isn’t quite the same as being willing to work for it.