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This doesn't scale. Even investors and economic agents can't be said to behave this way, and their incentives to put in the effort are much more immediate and

This doesn't scale. Even investors and economic agents can't be said to behave this way, and their incentives to put in the effort are much more immediate and explicit. Few people have the time, resources, patience, persistence, and expertise even figure out whether any single thing a single source said is true. (Imagine someone makes a single claim backed by a mountain of "true" data, but ignores some problematic data. Time, a little domain knowledge, and patience might suffice to validate the ground-level truth of what they did cite, but I'm not sure anything short of domain expertise will be able to view it in light of everything it didn't cite.)

pdonis 7y ago
> Few people have the time, resources, patience, persistence, and expertise even figure out whether any single thing a single source said is true. First, the amount of effort you invest should be proportional to the extent to which you care about whether the thing is true. If you care a lot, you should invest a lot of resources. If you don't care much, you shouldn't invest much. If you don't care at all, you should not invest any resources and you shouldn't have an opinion at all. Second, for most things where you actually need to know what's true in order to live your everyday life, you can test things by direct experience. And for most things that you can't test by direct experience, you don't actually care about what's true; expressions of opinion one way or the other are signaling, not actual commitments to the truth of the opinion expressed. This is easy to see because most people don't actually govern their actions according to, for example, the political opinions they express. And third, the only alternative solution to figuring it out for yourself is finding some third party that you can trust to do the work for you and truthfully convey to you the results. But then you have to decide which third parties to trust, and that just puts you right back at the same problem: few people have the time, patience, persistence, and expertise to actually evaluate the track record of truthfulness and accuracy of third parties. And every shortcut to that process can be, will be, and has been gamed.

pdonis 7y ago

> Few people have the time, resources, patience, persistence, and expertise even figure out whether any single thing a single source said is true. First, the amount of effort you invest should be proportional to the extent to which you care about whether the thing is true. If you care a lot, you should invest a lot of resources. If you don't care much, you shouldn't invest much. If you don't care at all, you should not invest any resources and you shouldn't have an opinion at all. Second, for most things where you actually need to know what's true in order to live your everyday life, you can test things by direct experience. And for most things that you can't test by direct experience, you don't actually care about what's true; expressions of opinion one way or the other are signaling, not actual commitments to the truth of the opinion expressed. This is easy to see because most people don't actually govern their actions according to, for example, the political opinions they express. And third, the only alternative solution to figuring it out for yourself is finding some third party that you can trust to do the work for you and truthfully convey to you the results. But then you have to decide which third parties to trust, and that just puts you right back at the same problem: few people have the time, patience, persistence, and expertise to actually evaluate the track record of truthfulness and accuracy of third parties. And every shortcut to that process can be, will be, and has been gamed.