Sorting Out Social Epistemology

With help from Dan Williams and Jeffrey Friedman

1. We decide what to believe by deciding who to believe

2. Someone who is widely believed is, by definition, influential

3. The process which determines who is influential in our society matters a great deal.

For example, how does someone become influential in economic policy? Allison Schrager points out that Yale Law school faculty and graduates have gained in influence relative to economics Ph.D’s. While I would not argue that having an econ Ph.D should be a necessary or sufficient condition to be influential on economic policy, I think that Schrager (who I have dubbed “the last mainstream economist”) is right to point out that Yale lawyers are not the best choice.

More generally, Dan Williams titled a recent post, America’s epistemological crisis. He discusses Jeffrey Friedman’s essay, Post-Truth and the Epistemological Crisis, published posthumously last year.

I think that the word “crisis” gets tossed around too promiscuously nowadays. To avoid that term, the way I would put it is that there are many good reasons to be dissatisfied with how things are going with (3), the process which determines who is influential. The various systems that are used in academia, journalism, politics, and media have been taken over to a dangerous extent by people who game those systems and/or obtain their status by using dominance/power rather than prestige/wisdom.

Williams points out that political polarization interacts with the warped nature of social influence in contemporary America.

The blue tribe observes a Republican Party and conservative media ecosystem poisoned by disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theories, populism, and post-truth. In their optimistic moments, they aim to address this crisis through various technocratic measures. By censoring, moderating, nudging, fact-checking, and inoculating a public infected with falsehoods and lies, they hope to drag America back to a golden age of objectivity in which people agreed on facts, even when they disagreed on values. In their more pessimistic moments, they treat the red tribe as a dangerous cult, an inexplicably psychotic force in American politics that can, at best, be kept away from power.

The red tribe observes a very different reality: a coalition of smug liberal elites, biased mainstream media outlets, and weak sheeple—so-called “NPCs” (non-player characters)—all infected by wokeism, virtue signalling, and left-wing activism masquerading as “expertise” and “science”. In their optimistic moments, they hope the crisis can be solved by exposing progressive insanity and handing out red pills to converts like Elon Musk and Joe Rogan with the courage to face reality. In their more pessimistic moments, they treat the blue tribe as a sinister fifth column in American society, so deeply embedded in cultural and political institutions that only a radical overhaul of these systems could restore the country to its previous greatness.

Referring to Friedman’s book, Power Without Knowledge, Williams writes,

Friedman argues that a person’s access to reality is profoundly mediated.

It is socially mediated because in forming beliefs about reality beyond our immediate environment, we rely almost entirely on information we acquire from others—from community members, teachers, journalists, politicians, pop stars, priests, experts, pundits, academics, media outlets, and so on. For this reason, our lived realities—what Walter Lippmann called our “pseudo-environments”, our mental models of reality—are powerfully shaped by the social information we encounter and the people and institutions we trust.

My shorter version is point (1) above, that we decide what to believe by deciding who to believe.

Williams distills Friedman’s analysis as saying that conservatives treat as sacred their own common sense while liberals treat as sacred credentialed expertise.¹ Think of how this works on issues related to gender. Those on the left will claim to have an expert consensus in favor of notions of gender fluidity. Those on the right will claim that those experts are full of nonsense.

In the “good old days,” an expert consensus was sufficient to settle issues.

the several decades of the middle-twentieth century were overwhelmingly a period of establishment liberal hegemony. It is this period of “epistemological complacency”, writes Friedman, “that the post-truth discourse mourns, for post-truth scholars mistake agreement—agreement among experts, and agreement with experts by nonexperts—as a sign of truth.”

In fact, we should not always trust credentialed experts. But we should not automatically reject their views in favor of common sense.

Suppose that (populist) conservatives take common sense as self-evidently true, while liberals take scientific opinion as self-evidently true. Then each side will regard people on the other side as not simply mistaken, but liars, because they oppose self-evident truth.

In Friedman’s telling, the mid-century consensus was disdained by radical progressives as well as by populist conservatives, with each feeling alienated from the mainstream. But while conservatives turned to talk radio and later established niches in cable TV and the Internet, radical progressives embedded themselves in existing institutions, especially universities.

I would add the point, made by Martin Gurri, that the Internet created a media environment in which mistakes by credentialed experts were discovered and called out. This results in what Gurri calls The Revolt of the Public, in which wide swaths of the population no longer accept what the elites tell them.

The Role of the Press Secretary

I would recommend a subtle modification to Friedman’s description of the progressive-populist conflict. Rather than describe the progressive as trusting the expert and the populist as trusting the gut, I would say that this difference occurs at the level of press secretary.

I believe that it is Jonathan Haidt who adapted the term press secretary to describe the part of one’s brain that works to justify oneself to others. We can modify Friedman’s story to say that Progressives appeal to a supposed expert consensus in order to justify their beliefs. Populists appeal instead to common sense to justify their beliefs. But their respective beliefs actually may not necessarily reflect science or common sense, respectively.

Systemic decay

Our systems for determining who is influential seem to have decayed. Academia has been corrupted by ideology. The media environment showers attention on pundits for engaging in tribalist sensationalism, not for carefully weighing the evidence. In politics, the primary process filters out those who would legislate via negotiation and compromise and instead elevates partisan posturing. The technocrats who rise to top positions too often get there by playing organizational politics and suppressing dissent, rather than by having wise judgment.

We have become accustomed to choosing who to believe based on tribal signals. On the left, membership in the well-educated class is signaled by “luxury beliefs,” along with a press secretary who justifies opinions by appeals to expertise. See Michael Huemer’s Progressive Myths.

People on the right operate in their own reality-distortion fields. Until more people care about truth rather than tribal status, we are likely to remain in a social epistemology slump, if not a crisis.

substacks referenced above:

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America's epistemological crisis

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Who killed economic liberalism?

1. This dichotomy does not always hold. Williams writes,

although the left is happy to trust experts on topics like climate change, vaccines, and public health guidance, these issues all align with its political agenda. On other topics (sex differences, IQ, behavioural genetics, mainstream economics, and so on), there is often a willingness to dismiss or ignore expert consensus. For example, a recent article in The Atlantic defends Kamala Harris’s proposed price-gouging ban with the title, “Sometimes You Just Have to Ignore the Economists.”

But I think that the dichotomy holds at the “press secretary” level, as I proceed to explain.