Dan Williams on Social Learning
Why the marketplace of ideas works and when it fails
an extremely simplified, quasi-economic model of epistemic cooperation therefore takes the following form:
People (i.e., consumers) seek out information that is relevant to their interests in much the same way that people seek out other goods and services.
Given this, they are motivated to reward (via approval, sympathy, respect, trust, etc.) those who share such information with them. Equally, those who share dishonest or unhelpful information are punished either directly or reputationally.
As a consequence, a system of social profits and losses encourages people to invest time and resources into generating (via cognitive labour) and sharing (via communication) information that other people value.
Because people tend to value reliable information relevant to their interests, these incentives generally favour the social transmission of accurate and helpful information.
We take the phenomenon of social learning for granted. Williams wants to point out the incentives that work to make it happen. He then looks at pitfalls that could cause social learning to misfire.
in complex, modern democracies, we are rarely in a position to directly test the information we acquire from others within the public sphere, either because it concerns phenomena that are too distant in space and time, or because the phenomena are too complex.
Our ability to sort through ideas that come to us from other people is only as good as the heuristics that we use. And often we have bad heuristics.
lots of the bad ideas emerge not through top-down attempts to manipulate audiences but from competition to win attention, respect, and trust from audiences who reward content that aligns with mistaken intuitions.
For example, in folk economics, spending creates jobs and jobs create spending. Because Keynesian economics says the same thing, people are very receptive to Keynesian economics. The idea that jobs are created when entrepreneurs successfully discover and create new patterns of specialization and trade does not get traction with the public (or even with most economists). I explain the idea in Specialization and Trade, available for free here.
Another challenge for social learning is myside bias.
sometimes we seek information not to figure out the truth but to acquire justifications for our preferred beliefs, narratives, and behaviours.
He writes,
The idea that truth will ultimately emerge victorious in a free marketplace of ideas is incorrect. Although there are principled reasons why the free exchange of ideas often favours the transmission of reliable information, this breaks down both (i) when the information is untestable and concerns counter-intuitive truths and (ii) when people seek out information to justify self-serving narratives and decisions.
I would quibble with the term “self-serving,” because it sounds as though people only are biased in favor of their material interests. In fact, people can hold strongly biased opinions that have no material benefit for them, and even opinions that go against their material interests. The benefit that they get from espousing an opinion comes from social approval.
His conclusion is,
we should strive to reward those who make better, more thoughtful, and less biased contributions to public debate with admiration and respect. Humans will never be disinterested truth seekers, but it is possible to construct norms and incentives that channel the human desire for status and social approval into collectively beneficial ends.
That was the original purpose of the Fantasy Intellectual Teams project. See also the essay grader. The idea was to develop criteria for rating public intellectuals on their ability to face up to the best arguments on the other side and treat opponents charitably. Readers would choose teams of pundits, and the pundits who accumulated the most points for good intellectual hygiene would produce winning teams. That way, both readers and pundits would be rewarded for engaging in fair debate.
substacks referenced above:
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I'd break motivations for belief into a few categories.
1) Because it makes you feel like you belong [social follower]
2) Because it makes you feel powerful and important [social leader]
3) Because it makes you feel righteous
4) Because it justifies why deserve what you do or do not already possess.
5) Because it models realty in a way not directly contradicted by experience.
Enlightenment philosophy seemed to think that only #5 mattered when the law doesn't directly regulate speech or conduct. Marxists emphasize #4 but only from the direction of justifying ownership rather than the reverse.
Progressive policy-making is a sort of epistemic super-cocktail that empowers, ennobles, and enrich their advocates all at the same time. The sexier and less practical the means the better. This is why nuclear power / carbon capture or geoengineering is so unpopular despite being far more effective at reducing carbon emissions.
Conservative policy making isn't pure truth either (nothing is) but it is usually limited to picking at most 2 and usually only 1 leg at a time. (e.g. Tax cuts #4 or school choice #3)
#1 is just the default capstone for anyone not interested in ideas or in a position to make or advocate for a change. It's the ideas marketplace equivalent of passive investing. It's also why public opinion is an effect and not a cause. Most people don't think things through and shouldn't be expected to in the same way they can't be expected to make a profit on tactical stock trades.
#5 is limited to testable hypotheses and train-autists. People who think this way systematically are rare, very valuable, and have a very hard time understanding people who reason socially or morally.
"The benefit that they get from espousing an opinion comes from social approval." Not necessarily a contradiction since social approval is a big proxy for future material prospects.