The real experts will likely spend a bunch of time correct popular misconceptions, which the fakers may subscribe to. By contrast, the fakers will generally not bother “correcting” the truth to their fakery, because why would they? They’re trying to sell to unreflective people who just believe the obvious-seeming thing; someone who actually bothered to read corrections to misconceptions at any point is likely too savvy to be their target audience.
Using this as a heuristic would often backfire on you as stated, because there’s a certain class of snake oil salesmen who use the conceit of correcting popular misconceptions to sell you on their own, unpopular misconceptions (and of course the product that fits them!). To me it looks like it’s exploiting the same kind of psychological mechanism that powers conspiracy theories, where the world is seen as full of hidden knowledge that “they” don’t want you to know because the misinformation is letting “them” get rich or whatever. And I think part of the reason this works is that it pattern matches to cases where it turned out someone who thought everyone else was wrong really was right, even if they are rare.
In short, you are more likely to be encountering a snake oil salesman than a Galileo or a Copernicus or a Darwin, so spending a lot of time “correcting” popular misconceptions is probably not a reliable signal of real competence and not fakery.
This is a good point (the redemption movement comes to mind as an example), but I think the cases I’m thinking of and the cases you’re describing look quite different in other details. Like, the bored/annoyed expert tired of having to correct basic mistakes, vs. the salesman who wants to initiate you into a new, exciting secret. But yeah, this is only a quick-and-dirty heuristic, and even then only good for distinguishing snake oil; it might not be a good idea to put too much weight on it, and it definitely won’t help you in a real dispute (“Wait, both sides are annoyed that the other is getting basic points wrong!”). As Eliezer put it—you can’t learn physics by studying psychology!
Using this as a heuristic would often backfire on you as stated, because there’s a certain class of snake oil salesmen who use the conceit of correcting popular misconceptions to sell you on their own, unpopular misconceptions (and of course the product that fits them!). To me it looks like it’s exploiting the same kind of psychological mechanism that powers conspiracy theories, where the world is seen as full of hidden knowledge that “they” don’t want you to know because the misinformation is letting “them” get rich or whatever. And I think part of the reason this works is that it pattern matches to cases where it turned out someone who thought everyone else was wrong really was right, even if they are rare.
In short, you are more likely to be encountering a snake oil salesman than a Galileo or a Copernicus or a Darwin, so spending a lot of time “correcting” popular misconceptions is probably not a reliable signal of real competence and not fakery.
This is a good point (the redemption movement comes to mind as an example), but I think the cases I’m thinking of and the cases you’re describing look quite different in other details. Like, the bored/annoyed expert tired of having to correct basic mistakes, vs. the salesman who wants to initiate you into a new, exciting secret. But yeah, this is only a quick-and-dirty heuristic, and even then only good for distinguishing snake oil; it might not be a good idea to put too much weight on it, and it definitely won’t help you in a real dispute (“Wait, both sides are annoyed that the other is getting basic points wrong!”). As Eliezer put it—you can’t learn physics by studying psychology!