As should be clear, this process can, after a few iterations, produce a situation in which most of those who have engaged with the arguments for a claim beyond some depth believe in it.
This isn’t clear to me, given the model in the post. If a claim is false and there are sufficiently many arguments for the claim, then it seems like everyone eventually ends up rejecting the claim, including those who have engaged most deeply with the arguments. The people who engage deeply “got lucky” by hearing the most persuasive arguments first, but eventually they also hear the weaker arguments and counterarguments to the claim, so they end up at a level of confidence where they don’t feel they should bother investigating further. These people can even have more accurate beliefs than the people who dropped out early in the process, depending on the cutoff that is chosen.
This isn’t clear to me, given the model in the post. If a claim is false and there are sufficiently many arguments for the claim, then it seems like everyone eventually ends up rejecting the claim, including those who have engaged most deeply with the arguments. The people who engage deeply “got lucky” by hearing the most persuasive arguments first, but eventually they also hear the weaker arguments and counterarguments to the claim, so they end up at a level of confidence where they don’t feel they should bother investigating further. These people can even have more accurate beliefs than the people who dropped out early in the process, depending on the cutoff that is chosen.