Suppose my Facebook friends share a terrible article (the one that comes to mind is one that came out a few years ago about male and female ELO distributions in chess). I can criticize my friends for sharing the article; I can criticize the authors for writing the article; I can criticize the editors for accepting the article. This shifts the social landscape slightly.
Focusing instead on ‘publish or perish’ seems like mistaking the proper scope of my actions, as I am not the Science Czar nor am I likely to become one.
I would suggest that the framework of influence/manipulation/memetics/control is going to be more useful here than the framework of free trade.
Influence is a more specialized description of these sorts of information markets, yes. But the point of that paragraph is that it is not just empirically the case that people will listen to each other and adopt opinions with minimal original seeing, but that it is obviously rational for them to do so in almost all contexts. The language and models of specialization and trade make that more clear.
Humans in general are pretty good at declaring things terrible, but I agree with the point that it’s nontrivial to claim that one’s judgment of terrible corresponds to useful principles.
It is obviously rational in almost all contexts for people to adopt other people’s opinions?
Yes, for the exact same reason as why it is obviously rational for people to trade for almost all products that they use, rather than produce them themselves. (The “that they use” qualifier is material; I don’t mean that you should buy everything on the market, but that what you consume should predominantly come from the market.)
The user’s effort is primarily in distinguishing between competitors created by specialist suppliers, not creating things themselves, and when they do create things they rarely go too many steps up the production chain from consumption. One might bake bread themselves from flour, from example, but they likely do not mill their own flour, or grow their own wheat, or domesticate their own wheat, or invent eating, and so on.
Are you assuming starting from zero, from tabula rasa? That’s not really the usual case. And if not, people, basically, have priors which are often strong priors. It does (and it should) take considerable amount of evidence to overcome them.
If you mean that when interested in a particular question one should google it up instead of trying to derive the whole thing from scratch, then sure. But an example I had in my head looks different:
You acquired a bit of money and decided to invest it. So, let’s ask the experts. You look around and there is a Schwab/Fidelity/blah brokerage. You go in and talk to the guy in there who is an expert and clearly knows more than you do. He recommends putting your money into their proprietary Schwab/Fidelity/blah fund. You do the “obviously rational” thing, give him the money, and leave. Is there a problem?
If you mean that when interested in a particular question one should google it up instead of trying to derive the whole thing from scratch, then sure.
This is basically what I mean. I’m trying to differentiate between what I’ll call the normal range of behavior (i.e. does this person seem like a do-it-yourselfer or not relative to other people I know) and the actual range of behavior (what fraction of the productive work done on things they consume does this person do themselves). If you focus just on the normal range, it’s easy to argue that one should do-it-themselves as much as possible, without realizing that the absolute level for “as much as possible” is closer to 2% than to 100%.
And if you start looking at things with the consumer mindset, then you start thinking about how to be a savvy consumer instead of how to be a producer, and I think that’s a very useful skillset to develop.
You do the “obviously rational” thing, give him the money, and leave. Is there a problem?
Yes—and it looks like the same problem as buying the first car you see for sale, and paying the asking price. (I’ll note that, as much of an index fund partisan as I am, I didn’t invent those arguments—I read them, they made sense to me, and I started doing it and repeating them).
Suppose my Facebook friends share a terrible article (the one that comes to mind is one that came out a few years ago about male and female ELO distributions in chess). I can criticize my friends for sharing the article; I can criticize the authors for writing the article; I can criticize the editors for accepting the article. This shifts the social landscape slightly.
Focusing instead on ‘publish or perish’ seems like mistaking the proper scope of my actions, as I am not the Science Czar nor am I likely to become one.
Influence is a more specialized description of these sorts of information markets, yes. But the point of that paragraph is that it is not just empirically the case that people will listen to each other and adopt opinions with minimal original seeing, but that it is obviously rational for them to do so in almost all contexts. The language and models of specialization and trade make that more clear.
Assuming you notice the article is terrible.
Humans in general are pretty good at declaring things terrible, but I agree with the point that it’s nontrivial to claim that one’s judgment of terrible corresponds to useful principles.
I’m not sure I understand your claim. It is obviously rational in almost all contexts for people to adopt other people’s opinions?
Yes, for the exact same reason as why it is obviously rational for people to trade for almost all products that they use, rather than produce them themselves. (The “that they use” qualifier is material; I don’t mean that you should buy everything on the market, but that what you consume should predominantly come from the market.)
The user’s effort is primarily in distinguishing between competitors created by specialist suppliers, not creating things themselves, and when they do create things they rarely go too many steps up the production chain from consumption. One might bake bread themselves from flour, from example, but they likely do not mill their own flour, or grow their own wheat, or domesticate their own wheat, or invent eating, and so on.
Are you assuming starting from zero, from tabula rasa? That’s not really the usual case. And if not, people, basically, have priors which are often strong priors. It does (and it should) take considerable amount of evidence to overcome them.
If you mean that when interested in a particular question one should google it up instead of trying to derive the whole thing from scratch, then sure. But an example I had in my head looks different:
You acquired a bit of money and decided to invest it. So, let’s ask the experts. You look around and there is a Schwab/Fidelity/blah brokerage. You go in and talk to the guy in there who is an expert and clearly knows more than you do. He recommends putting your money into their proprietary Schwab/Fidelity/blah fund. You do the “obviously rational” thing, give him the money, and leave. Is there a problem?
This is basically what I mean. I’m trying to differentiate between what I’ll call the normal range of behavior (i.e. does this person seem like a do-it-yourselfer or not relative to other people I know) and the actual range of behavior (what fraction of the productive work done on things they consume does this person do themselves). If you focus just on the normal range, it’s easy to argue that one should do-it-themselves as much as possible, without realizing that the absolute level for “as much as possible” is closer to 2% than to 100%.
And if you start looking at things with the consumer mindset, then you start thinking about how to be a savvy consumer instead of how to be a producer, and I think that’s a very useful skillset to develop.
Yes—and it looks like the same problem as buying the first car you see for sale, and paying the asking price. (I’ll note that, as much of an index fund partisan as I am, I didn’t invent those arguments—I read them, they made sense to me, and I started doing it and repeating them).