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Dean Valentine's avatar

> Yet even experts in Y are also reluctant to endorse a claim made by an expert in X that differs from what MSM says about X. As the other experts in Y whose respect they seek also tend to rely on MSM for their views on X, our experts in Y want to stick with those MSM views, even if they have private info to the contrary.

> These examples suggest that, for most people, the beliefs that they are willing to endorse depend more on what they expect their key audiences to endorse, relative to their private info on belief accuracy.

The examples listed here seem like broad strokes that aren't nuanced enough to be really correct, and even if they were, they dont generalize well to the broad conclusion. There are plenty of obvious reasons why experts might not want to contradict the opinions of news networks publicly besides the fact that they like to agree with their viewers. There's also plenty of fields I can name where experts are all too happy to deride the "MSM" for their explanations and suggestions - it's practically used as a bonding mechanism in my field, cyber security. I think you are overfitting here on specific, politically charged topics as a rationalist and economist, and ending up saying something nonsensical. Do you find physicists at George Mason are keen on endorsing pop sci articles?

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free_agent's avatar

Certainly correct as far as it goes. But it's not surprising; Trivers' analysis states that the "conscious" information we talk about and the "subconscious" information we use to make choices is not the same, and may be disjoint. (In practice, leading to the fine art of letting the conscious mind construct socially-acceptable descriptions of why one made particular choices.) Much of the difficult work of life is maximizing one's social status, which has little to do with expounding factually accurate models of how the world works.

A fine example is Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly", which is a catalog of incidents where polities persistently carries out policies that were disastrous. But they all have the same pattern: The actors in question were not primarily rewarded or punished based on the long-term success of the polity, but by internal political contests within the polity. E.g. in the run-up to the American Revolution, the parliamentary leaders of the U.K. were generally disposed to strike compromises that would keep the southern American colonies within the U.K. But the backbenchers insisted that Parliament stamp out any lack of submissiveness in the colonies. There is no evidence that any backbencher lost his seat over the failure of this strategy.

The interesting evidence would be where you can distinguish (1) choices people make that affect themselves but are not socially visible from (2) choices people make in public (ideally, ones that do not affect themselves much).

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