Different availability of aptitude at the high end
Different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search
So more precisely, you can be fired even for a non-mainstream opinion you don’t express, as long as people try hard enough to assign it to you connotationally. When the social norm is to disbelieve X, then saying “we should test X experimentally” suggests that you are not disbelieving enough; otherwise you would consider experimentally testing X a waste of time.
Also, when enough people consider powerful people who believe X and act accordingly a personal threat to them or people they care about, being perceived as a powerful person expressing a willingness to consider X causes lots of people to treat me as a personal threat.
Let’s not forget that it even wasn’t his stated opinion. It was one of the three hypotheses he suggested as worth testing experimentally:
So more precisely, you can be fired even for a non-mainstream opinion you don’t express, as long as people try hard enough to assign it to you connotationally. When the social norm is to disbelieve X, then saying “we should test X experimentally” suggests that you are not disbelieving enough; otherwise you would consider experimentally testing X a waste of time.
Also, when enough people consider powerful people who believe X and act accordingly a personal threat to them or people they care about, being perceived as a powerful person expressing a willingness to consider X causes lots of people to treat me as a personal threat.