“So what an expert rationalist should do to avoid this overconfidence trap? The seeming answer is that we should rely less on our own reasoning and more on the “wisdom of the crowds.”
As Bryan Caplan’s “Myth of the Rational Voter” pretty convincingly shows, the wisdom of crowds is of little use when the costs of irrationality are low. It’s true in democracy: voting for an irrational policy like tariffs has almost no cost, because a single vote almost never matters. The benefit of feeling good about voting for what you like to believe in is big, though.
Similarly, in religious matters, the costs to the individual are usually slight compared to the benefits: the cost of, say, weekly attendance of a church provides group bonding and social connections. [There are certainly places, and there were times, when costs were vastly higher—daily attendance, alms tax, etc. But the benefits were proportionately bigger, as your group would be key to defending your life.]
In either case, trusting the wisdom of crowds seems to be a dangerous idea: if the crowd is systematically biased, you’re screwed.
“So what an expert rationalist should do to avoid this overconfidence trap? The seeming answer is that we should rely less on our own reasoning and more on the “wisdom of the crowds.”
As Bryan Caplan’s “Myth of the Rational Voter” pretty convincingly shows, the wisdom of crowds is of little use when the costs of irrationality are low. It’s true in democracy: voting for an irrational policy like tariffs has almost no cost, because a single vote almost never matters. The benefit of feeling good about voting for what you like to believe in is big, though.
Similarly, in religious matters, the costs to the individual are usually slight compared to the benefits: the cost of, say, weekly attendance of a church provides group bonding and social connections. [There are certainly places, and there were times, when costs were vastly higher—daily attendance, alms tax, etc. But the benefits were proportionately bigger, as your group would be key to defending your life.]
In either case, trusting the wisdom of crowds seems to be a dangerous idea: if the crowd is systematically biased, you’re screwed.