Agreed that thinking about informational ecosystems is very high leverage. It’s not clear to me whether it’s better to call for greater individual virtue (as you do here) vs trying to rework the underlying incentive structure (some posts of mine that fall into that general category: 1, 2).
One notion I’ve found helpful, which is one of the things you’re getting at here, is that of “ideological Matthew effects”. Basically, the more dominant an ideology is, the less receptive people become to competing ideologies / the more people that ideology has available to shout down critics. Under this framework, contrarians can be really valuable even if they are usually wrong, because they inject diversity into the informational ecosystem. However, unless you’re in a betting context like the stock market, contrarianism has an incentives problem—from an individual incentives perspective, a contrarian risks opprobrium/ostracization/etc., whereas society being marginally more correct about topic X is generally a public good.
Agreed that thinking about informational ecosystems is very high leverage. It’s not clear to me whether it’s better to call for greater individual virtue (as you do here) vs trying to rework the underlying incentive structure (some posts of mine that fall into that general category: 1, 2).
One notion I’ve found helpful, which is one of the things you’re getting at here, is that of “ideological Matthew effects”. Basically, the more dominant an ideology is, the less receptive people become to competing ideologies / the more people that ideology has available to shout down critics. Under this framework, contrarians can be really valuable even if they are usually wrong, because they inject diversity into the informational ecosystem. However, unless you’re in a betting context like the stock market, contrarianism has an incentives problem—from an individual incentives perspective, a contrarian risks opprobrium/ostracization/etc., whereas society being marginally more correct about topic X is generally a public good.
Recently I was toying with the idea of publicly shaming any well-funded group that doesn’t offer cash prizes for the best arguments that it’s misguided (possibly inspired by this post). Didn’t seem to take very well though.