Your question naturally leads to a more general one—what is it in fact that causes people to develop beliefs that are closer to reality than the respectable consensus (which often makes them seriously disreputable)?
It is certainly not superior intelligence or knowledge. The normal modus operandi for smart people is to acquire practically useful knowledge and act on it, but at the same time, when it comes to any issues that are of more signaling than practical interest, to figure out instinctively what the respectable opinion is and converge on it, no matter how remote from reality it might be. (Of course, if there is a conflict between signaling and instrumental implications of some issue, then hypocrisy and rationalizations are called for.) On the whole, smarter people tend to be more in line with the respectable opinion, since they are able to figure out how to optimize their views for maximum signaling value.
Most instances of people who have disreputable beliefs are those who have picked them up in various low-status social circles and who are too stupid to realize their status implications, or are for some reason doomed to low status anyway so they don’t have to bother. Ironically, this means that in cases where respectable beliefs are delusional, most people who instead hold more accurate beliefs belong to these categories, and just happen to be right in a stopped-clock sort of way. Therefore, as a statistical implication, respectable beliefs signal smarts and high status even when they’re in fact delusional, while disreputable ones signal stupidity and low status even when they’re actually correct!
Now, what about people who are smart and who have actually applied sound thinking to move their beliefs closer to reality than the respectable opinion? If you belong to this category, it can mean one of several things:
Your brain is wired in some non-standard manner, so that it doesn’t deal with status signaling and social conformity in the usual way. This clearly sends off bad signals, since it increases the probability that you might be weird, dysfunctional, or even dangerous in all sorts of ways.
Your brain is wired in a way that makes it hard to acquire those beliefs that happen to be respectable here and now. (But you would conform easily, perhaps exceptionally so, in a different society with different respectable beliefs.)
You’ve belonged, or still belong simultaneously, to non-mainstream social circles (or alien societies) that have different status criteria for beliefs.
You’ve noticed a clash of respectable beliefs with reality that was too severe to rationalize away.
(Are there perhaps other possibilities I’m missing?)
Clearly, each of these possibilities has different implications, which may further depend on the context. In particular, the ability to hide problematic beliefs doesn’t by itself signal general antisocial traits. People are expected to be able to hide what they know and believe in some situations—for example, when being fully upfront would mean revealing some business secret. This ability is in fact a required part of a functional personality.
I would however take it as evidence of antisocial traits if someone goes out of his way to assert respectable beliefs loudly and piously (for example, by taking up a political career), and who does it convincingly with conscious duplicity.
If one is in no position to act on a delusional belief, then optimal behavior is to believe in the delusional but socially desirable belief with full sincerity. But unless one is aware of reality, one cannot reliably judge which delusion is safe. For example, one of my politically correct Australian nieces assumed it would be safe to walk down a street named Martin Luther King Boulevard. My seemingly equally politically correct American niece would be unlikely to do so.
While the example is basically correct, I fear it might kill more minds than enlighten then.
By doing this you basically force breach a compartment in someone’s mind. While of course a well intentioned person might hope this would motivate them to fix the leak and clear the water out of the flooded compartment, it might however just help sink the ship a little bit more, by making another part of their cognitive tool kit “dangerous” to use.
Browsing through your comment history, there are some comments I disagree with and some I agree with, and certainly the same would be true for you if you looked at my commenting style. I really don’t wish to brag, since my style is far from perfect, but perhaps dare I say my approach may be slightly more productive? Though naturally if no commenter’s with your style ever appeared I may find myself under overwhelming scrutiny and need to be quieter on some of my contrarian stances.
Um, you might want to change that to Martin Luther King boulevard. It took me a minute to realize you weren’t talking about an anti-semitic early Protestant.
Someone who sincerely believes is dangerous to himself and everyone around him, classic recent examples being Washington Mutual’s Kerry Killinger, and Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo. They conned everyone of gigantic amounts of money, but their biggest victims were themselves and their banks.
On the other hand, had they not sincerely believed, it is unlikely that they would have been helicoptered up to such wealth and power.
If their belief had been feigned and cynical, a lot more of the disappeared money would have stuck to them. But perhaps had their belief been feigned and cynical, they would not have been the beneficiaries of such great regulatory favor.
Note that Kerry Killinger and Angelo Mozilo did not come from elite universities, and by all indications, are not very bright. Goldman and Sach bailed out later than they should have, indicating some degree of unfeigned sincerity, but bailed out soon enough, indicating some degree of feigned sincerity and cynical pretense. This suggests that true believers are to be found in both elite and second ranking universities, but more easily found in second ranking universities.
On the whole, smarter people tend to be more in line with the respectable opinion, since they are able to figure out how to optimize their views for maximum signaling value.
This carries all sorts of interesting implications.
Your brain is wired in some non-standard manner, so that it doesn’t deal with status signaling and social conformity in the usual way. This clearly sends off bad signals, since it increases the probability that you might be weird, dysfunctional, or even dangerous in all sorts of ways.
This seem to be a better way to state some of what I was going for in the third paragraph of my comment.
Your brain is wired in a way that makes it hard to acquire those beliefs that happen to be respectable here and now. (But you would conform easily, perhaps exceptionally so, in a different society with different respectable beliefs.)
There seems to be some overlap between this and the previous one.
You’ve belonged, or still belong simultaneously, to non-mainstream social circles (or alien societies) that have different status criteria for beliefs.
(Of course, if there is a conflict between signaling and instrumental implications of some issue, then hypocrisy and rationalizations are called for.)
(Are there perhaps other possibilities I’m missing?)
You are unlucky enough that what is for the vast majority empty signalling is for you practically useful (perhaps vital) knowledge.
It may be that the gap between reality and signalling would actually be too great to rationalize for anyone who had practical use for it, you are just the one stuck with it. The effect of this might be in the long term sufficient to hurt the reputation and signalling value of certain professions, economic niches or even entire (sub)cultures.
This [smart people having a greater ability to figure out high-status-signaling views and acquire them] carries all sorts of interesting implications.
Yes, especially when we couple it with the fact that smart people have not just more ability, but usually also stronger incentives to optimize their views for signaling value. The smarter you are, the greater is the relative contribution of the signaling value of your views and opinions to your overall status likely to be. On the very top of this scale are people whose primary identity in life is that of prestigious intellectuals. (Unsurprisingly, the views of such people tend to be extremely uniform and confined to a very narrow range of variation.)
One puzzle here however is that the level of status-driven intellectual uniformity has varied a lot historically. In the Western world it was certainly far lower, say, a 100 or 150 years ago than today. Reading books from that period, it’s clear that a lot of what people said and wrote was driven by signaling rather than matter-of-fact thinking, but the ratio was nothing like the overwhelming preponderance of the former that we see nowadays. It seems like back then, intellectual status-signaling was somehow successfully channeled outside of the main subjects of intellectual disputes, leaving enough room for an honest no-nonsense debate, which is practically nonexistent today in respectable venues outside of hard sciences and technical subjects.
I have only some vague and speculative hypotheses about the possible explanations for these historical differences, though.
There two seem to have some overlap.
I’m not sure about that. It seems to me that these might be completely independent mechanisms. The first, unlike the second, would stem from a failure of the general mechanisms for handling status and social norms, indicating a more generally dysfunctional personality, while the second one would result in a perfectly functional individual except for this particular quirk consisting of some odd and perhaps disreputable beliefs.
It may be that the gap between reality and signalling would actually be too great to rationalize for anyone who had practical use for it, you are just the one stuck with it. The effect of this might be in the long term sufficient to hurt the reputation and signalling value of certain professions, economic niches or even entire (sub)cultures.
Yes, this is indeed an interesting scenario. I can think of a few ongoing examples, although describing them explicitly would probably mean going too far into ideologically charged topics for this forum.
One puzzle here however is that the level of status-driven intellectual uniformity has varied a lot historically. In the Western world it was certainly far lower, say, a 100 or 150 years ago than today. Reading books from that period, it’s clear that a lot of what people said and wrote was driven by signaling rather than matter-of-fact thinking, but the ratio was nothing like the overwhelming preponderance of the former that we see nowadays.
This could just be the nostalgia filter (WARNING: tvtropes), i.e., there were also a lot of pure status signaling works back then, but they have since been forgotten.
I read enough old books to recognize nineteenth century political correctness when I see it (example: Enlightened Imperialism). It is markedly less obnoxious and omnipresent than twenty first century political correctness.
This could just be the nostalgia filter [...], i.e., there were also a lot of pure status signaling works back then, but they have since been forgotten.
Undoubtedly there were, but I think a fair assessment can be made by observing only people who were recognized as high-status intellectuals in their own day. When I look at books written a century or more ago by people for whom I know that they were recognized as such back then, I simply don’t see anything like the uniformity of opinion among practically all people who enjoy similar status today.
Moreover, on many topics, it’s impossible to find anything written by today’s high-status intellectuals that isn’t just awful cant with little or no value beyond signaling. (And it’s not like I haven’t looked for it.) At the same time, older literature on the same topics written by similarly prestigious people is also full of nonsense, but it’s also easy to find works that are quite reasonable and matter-of-fact.
Even if my conclusions are somehow biased, I don’t think they can be explained by a simple nostalgia filter.
Yes, especially when we couple it with the fact that smart people have not just more ability, but usually also stronger incentives to optimize their views for signaling value. The smarter you are, the greater is the relative contribution of the signaling value of your views and opinions to your overall status likely to be. On the very top of this scale are people whose primary identity in life is that of prestigious intellectuals. (Unsurprisingly, the views of such people tend to be extremely uniform and confined to a very narrow range of variation.)
One puzzle here however is that the level of status-driven intellectual uniformity has varied a lot historically. In the Western world it was certainly far lower, say, a 100 or 150 years ago than today. Reading books from that period, it’s clear that a lot of what people said and wrote was driven by signaling rather than matter-of-fact thinking, but the ratio was nothing like the overwhelming preponderance of the former that we see nowadays. It seems like back then, intellectual status-signaling was somehow successfully channeled outside of the main subjects of intellectual disputes, leaving enough room for an honest no-nonsense debate, which is practically nonexistent today in respectable venues outside of hard sciences and technical subjects.
I have only some vague and speculative hypotheses about the possible explanations for these historical differences, though.
This would make for a very interesting topic of discussion, in a different context I came to a similar surprising observation. But I think more specific examples, data and perhaps a few citations might prove vital for this. Potentially problematic because the 19th and 20th century are not without cause sometimes referred to in my corner of the world as “half passed history” since their interpretation carries direct political and ideological implications for the present day.
I need to think about whether to write down my reply here or PM you regarding this, just wanted to first make this public though, so anyone else interested and willing to risk it has a chance to jump in. :)
Your brain is wired in some non-standard manner, so that it doesn’t deal with status signaling and social conformity in the usual way. This clearly sends off bad signals, since it increases the probability that you might be weird, dysfunctional, or even dangerous in all sorts of ways.
Your brain is wired in a way that makes it hard to acquire those beliefs that happen to be respectable here and now. (But you would conform easily, perhaps exceptionally so, in a different society with different respectable beliefs.)
...
I’m not sure about that. It seems to me that these might be completely independent mechanisms. The first, unlike the second, would stem from a failure of the general mechanisms for handling status and social norms, indicating a more generally dysfunctional personality, while the second one would result in a perfectly functional individual except for this particular quirk consisting of some odd and perhaps disreputable beliefs.
Yes, but some societal beliefs are about status distribution. Or to go for a more general argument societies have differing status distributions and emphasise different ways to distribute status. Its perfectly possible that not “dealing with status signalling” in a usual way might actually be an advantage in some societies or would have a workable niche or societal role that isn’t available in some other society. Thus basically the system wouldn’t really be a failure in such situations, the individual would be by definition functional.
Historically (and even today) mental illness seems to me to be an example a category where the status hit seems more or less proportional to societal dysfunction or rather how the person fails to live up to ideals, rather than making any clear distinction between the two.
Why would we have differing mechanisms for this? Isn’t it easier for the brain to cover both under a simple “avoid socially dysfunctional people” directive?
Why would we have differing mechanisms for this? Isn’t it easier for the brain to cover both under a simple “avoid socially dysfunctional people” directive?
The important practical distinction is that under the second scenario, the person in question would be perfectly functional until some specific issue came up where his views differ from the respectable consensus. Such a person could stay completely out of trouble by figuring out on what occasions it’s advisable to keep his mouth shut. In contrast, the first scenario would imply a personality that’s dysfunctional across the board due to his broken handling of status and social norms, with no easy fix.
Moreover, it seems to me that broken handling of status and social norms would imply dysfunction in any society.
Having problems with authority and being unable to find and maintain friends and allies is a recipe for disaster in any conceivable social order. It is true that some societies might have niche roles for some types of such individuals, but that’s an exception that proves the rule.
(Are there perhaps other possibilities I’m missing?)
Perhaps this as well:
Strategically it seems a different set point for respectable opinion would be the best way to raise your own status
This seems very useful in times of revolutionary change and might explain why large groups of people update so rapidly when the old set point seems to be loosing but still has the upper hand. Trying to change a respectable opinion to a different setting seems a viable way dislodge and disrupt older alliances (as the members will not update simultaneously) allowing new actors to gain power and status rapidly. This may be particularly useful for anyone who “belonged, or still belongs simultaneously, to non-mainstream social circles (or alien societies) that have different status criteria for beliefs”.
Your question naturally leads to a more general one—what is it in fact that causes people to develop beliefs that are closer to reality than the respectable consensus (which often makes them seriously disreputable)?
It is certainly not superior intelligence or knowledge. The normal modus operandi for smart people is to acquire practically useful knowledge and act on it, but at the same time, when it comes to any issues that are of more signaling than practical interest, to figure out instinctively what the respectable opinion is and converge on it, no matter how remote from reality it might be. (Of course, if there is a conflict between signaling and instrumental implications of some issue, then hypocrisy and rationalizations are called for.) On the whole, smarter people tend to be more in line with the respectable opinion, since they are able to figure out how to optimize their views for maximum signaling value.
Most instances of people who have disreputable beliefs are those who have picked them up in various low-status social circles and who are too stupid to realize their status implications, or are for some reason doomed to low status anyway so they don’t have to bother. Ironically, this means that in cases where respectable beliefs are delusional, most people who instead hold more accurate beliefs belong to these categories, and just happen to be right in a stopped-clock sort of way. Therefore, as a statistical implication, respectable beliefs signal smarts and high status even when they’re in fact delusional, while disreputable ones signal stupidity and low status even when they’re actually correct!
Now, what about people who are smart and who have actually applied sound thinking to move their beliefs closer to reality than the respectable opinion? If you belong to this category, it can mean one of several things:
Your brain is wired in some non-standard manner, so that it doesn’t deal with status signaling and social conformity in the usual way. This clearly sends off bad signals, since it increases the probability that you might be weird, dysfunctional, or even dangerous in all sorts of ways.
Your brain is wired in a way that makes it hard to acquire those beliefs that happen to be respectable here and now. (But you would conform easily, perhaps exceptionally so, in a different society with different respectable beliefs.)
You’ve belonged, or still belong simultaneously, to non-mainstream social circles (or alien societies) that have different status criteria for beliefs.
You’ve noticed a clash of respectable beliefs with reality that was too severe to rationalize away.
(Are there perhaps other possibilities I’m missing?)
Clearly, each of these possibilities has different implications, which may further depend on the context. In particular, the ability to hide problematic beliefs doesn’t by itself signal general antisocial traits. People are expected to be able to hide what they know and believe in some situations—for example, when being fully upfront would mean revealing some business secret. This ability is in fact a required part of a functional personality.
I would however take it as evidence of antisocial traits if someone goes out of his way to assert respectable beliefs loudly and piously (for example, by taking up a political career), and who does it convincingly with conscious duplicity.
If one is in no position to act on a delusional belief, then optimal behavior is to believe in the delusional but socially desirable belief with full sincerity. But unless one is aware of reality, one cannot reliably judge which delusion is safe. For example, one of my politically correct Australian nieces assumed it would be safe to walk down a street named Martin Luther King Boulevard. My seemingly equally politically correct American niece would be unlikely to do so.
While the example is basically correct, I fear it might kill more minds than enlighten then.
By doing this you basically force breach a compartment in someone’s mind. While of course a well intentioned person might hope this would motivate them to fix the leak and clear the water out of the flooded compartment, it might however just help sink the ship a little bit more, by making another part of their cognitive tool kit “dangerous” to use.
Browsing through your comment history, there are some comments I disagree with and some I agree with, and certainly the same would be true for you if you looked at my commenting style. I really don’t wish to brag, since my style is far from perfect, but perhaps dare I say my approach may be slightly more productive? Though naturally if no commenter’s with your style ever appeared I may find myself under overwhelming scrutiny and need to be quieter on some of my contrarian stances.
Um, you might want to change that to Martin Luther King boulevard. It took me a minute to realize you weren’t talking about an anti-semitic early Protestant.
Someone who sincerely believes is dangerous to himself and everyone around him, classic recent examples being Washington Mutual’s Kerry Killinger, and Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo. They conned everyone of gigantic amounts of money, but their biggest victims were themselves and their banks.
On the other hand, had they not sincerely believed, it is unlikely that they would have been helicoptered up to such wealth and power.
If their belief had been feigned and cynical, a lot more of the disappeared money would have stuck to them. But perhaps had their belief been feigned and cynical, they would not have been the beneficiaries of such great regulatory favor.
Note that Kerry Killinger and Angelo Mozilo did not come from elite universities, and by all indications, are not very bright. Goldman and Sach bailed out later than they should have, indicating some degree of unfeigned sincerity, but bailed out soon enough, indicating some degree of feigned sincerity and cynical pretense. This suggests that true believers are to be found in both elite and second ranking universities, but more easily found in second ranking universities.
This carries all sorts of interesting implications.
This seem to be a better way to state some of what I was going for in the third paragraph of my comment.
There seems to be some overlap between this and the previous one.
This includes meta-contrarians correct?
You are unlucky enough that what is for the vast majority empty signalling is for you practically useful (perhaps vital) knowledge.
It may be that the gap between reality and signalling would actually be too great to rationalize for anyone who had practical use for it, you are just the one stuck with it. The effect of this might be in the long term sufficient to hurt the reputation and signalling value of certain professions, economic niches or even entire (sub)cultures.
Yes, especially when we couple it with the fact that smart people have not just more ability, but usually also stronger incentives to optimize their views for signaling value. The smarter you are, the greater is the relative contribution of the signaling value of your views and opinions to your overall status likely to be. On the very top of this scale are people whose primary identity in life is that of prestigious intellectuals. (Unsurprisingly, the views of such people tend to be extremely uniform and confined to a very narrow range of variation.)
One puzzle here however is that the level of status-driven intellectual uniformity has varied a lot historically. In the Western world it was certainly far lower, say, a 100 or 150 years ago than today. Reading books from that period, it’s clear that a lot of what people said and wrote was driven by signaling rather than matter-of-fact thinking, but the ratio was nothing like the overwhelming preponderance of the former that we see nowadays. It seems like back then, intellectual status-signaling was somehow successfully channeled outside of the main subjects of intellectual disputes, leaving enough room for an honest no-nonsense debate, which is practically nonexistent today in respectable venues outside of hard sciences and technical subjects.
I have only some vague and speculative hypotheses about the possible explanations for these historical differences, though.
I’m not sure about that. It seems to me that these might be completely independent mechanisms. The first, unlike the second, would stem from a failure of the general mechanisms for handling status and social norms, indicating a more generally dysfunctional personality, while the second one would result in a perfectly functional individual except for this particular quirk consisting of some odd and perhaps disreputable beliefs.
Yes, this is indeed an interesting scenario. I can think of a few ongoing examples, although describing them explicitly would probably mean going too far into ideologically charged topics for this forum.
This could just be the nostalgia filter (WARNING: tvtropes), i.e., there were also a lot of pure status signaling works back then, but they have since been forgotten.
I read enough old books to recognize nineteenth century political correctness when I see it (example: Enlightened Imperialism). It is markedly less obnoxious and omnipresent than twenty first century political correctness.
Undoubtedly there were, but I think a fair assessment can be made by observing only people who were recognized as high-status intellectuals in their own day. When I look at books written a century or more ago by people for whom I know that they were recognized as such back then, I simply don’t see anything like the uniformity of opinion among practically all people who enjoy similar status today.
Moreover, on many topics, it’s impossible to find anything written by today’s high-status intellectuals that isn’t just awful cant with little or no value beyond signaling. (And it’s not like I haven’t looked for it.) At the same time, older literature on the same topics written by similarly prestigious people is also full of nonsense, but it’s also easy to find works that are quite reasonable and matter-of-fact.
Even if my conclusions are somehow biased, I don’t think they can be explained by a simple nostalgia filter.
This would make for a very interesting topic of discussion, in a different context I came to a similar surprising observation. But I think more specific examples, data and perhaps a few citations might prove vital for this. Potentially problematic because the 19th and 20th century are not without cause sometimes referred to in my corner of the world as “half passed history” since their interpretation carries direct political and ideological implications for the present day.
I need to think about whether to write down my reply here or PM you regarding this, just wanted to first make this public though, so anyone else interested and willing to risk it has a chance to jump in. :)
...
Yes, but some societal beliefs are about status distribution. Or to go for a more general argument societies have differing status distributions and emphasise different ways to distribute status. Its perfectly possible that not “dealing with status signalling” in a usual way might actually be an advantage in some societies or would have a workable niche or societal role that isn’t available in some other society. Thus basically the system wouldn’t really be a failure in such situations, the individual would be by definition functional.
Historically (and even today) mental illness seems to me to be an example a category where the status hit seems more or less proportional to societal dysfunction or rather how the person fails to live up to ideals, rather than making any clear distinction between the two.
Why would we have differing mechanisms for this? Isn’t it easier for the brain to cover both under a simple “avoid socially dysfunctional people” directive?
The important practical distinction is that under the second scenario, the person in question would be perfectly functional until some specific issue came up where his views differ from the respectable consensus. Such a person could stay completely out of trouble by figuring out on what occasions it’s advisable to keep his mouth shut. In contrast, the first scenario would imply a personality that’s dysfunctional across the board due to his broken handling of status and social norms, with no easy fix.
Moreover, it seems to me that broken handling of status and social norms would imply dysfunction in any society. Having problems with authority and being unable to find and maintain friends and allies is a recipe for disaster in any conceivable social order. It is true that some societies might have niche roles for some types of such individuals, but that’s an exception that proves the rule.
Perhaps this as well:
Strategically it seems a different set point for respectable opinion would be the best way to raise your own status
This seems very useful in times of revolutionary change and might explain why large groups of people update so rapidly when the old set point seems to be loosing but still has the upper hand. Trying to change a respectable opinion to a different setting seems a viable way dislodge and disrupt older alliances (as the members will not update simultaneously) allowing new actors to gain power and status rapidly. This may be particularly useful for anyone who “belonged, or still belongs simultaneously, to non-mainstream social circles (or alien societies) that have different status criteria for beliefs”.