I’ve noticed a similar neglect of obvious first order effects too. Intuitively the signalling and counter-signalling explanations seem the most likely to be correct to me.
This reminds me of the following popular meme template:
In this template you have very smart people and very dumb people coming to the same conclusion by using similar simple arguments, while the moderately intelligent come up with complex, clever, but ultimately wrong arguments for why the obvious policy choice is incorrect. Here, I’ve made a version with the very dumb & very smart arguing that death is bad using the obvious argument that “it kills people”, while the moderately intelligent person argues that death is good because of various commonly argued second-order pro-death arguments.
I’ve noticed a similar neglect of obvious first order effects too. Intuitively the signalling and counter-signalling explanations seem the most likely to be correct to me.
This reminds me of the following popular meme template:
In this template you have very smart people and very dumb people coming to the same conclusion by using similar simple arguments, while the moderately intelligent come up with complex, clever, but ultimately wrong arguments for why the obvious policy choice is incorrect. Here, I’ve made a version with the very dumb & very smart arguing that death is bad using the obvious argument that “it kills people”, while the moderately intelligent person argues that death is good because of various commonly argued second-order pro-death arguments.