Abstract
AbstractA person’s epistemic goals sometimes clash with pragmatic ones. At times, rational agents will degrade the quality of their epistemic process in order to satisfy a goal that is knowledge-independent (for example, to gain status or at least keep the peace with friends.) This is particularly so when the epistemic quest concerns an abstract political or economic theory, where evidence is likely to be softer and open to interpretation. Before wide-scale adoption of the Internet, people sought out or stumbled upon evidence related to a proposition in a more random way. And it was difficult to aggregate the evidence of friends and other similar people to the exclusion of others, even if one had wanted to. Today, by contrast, the searchable Internet allows people to simultaneously pursue social and epistemic goals.This essay shows that the selection effect caused by a merging of social and epistemic activities will cause both polarization in beliefs and devaluation of expert testimony. This will occur even if agents are rational Bayesians and have moderate credences before talking to their peers. What appears to be rampant dogmatism could be just as well explained by the nonrandom walk in evidence-gathering. This explanation better matches the empirical evidence on how people behave on social media platforms. It also helps clarify why media outlets (not just the Internet platforms) might have their own pragmatic reasons to compromise their epistemic goals in today’s competitive and polarized information market. Yet, it also makes policy intervention much more difficult, since we are unlikely to neatly separate individuals’ epistemic goals from their social ones.
Highlights
A person’s epistemic goals sometimes clash with pragmatic ones
This essay shows that the selection effect caused by a merging of social and epistemic activities will cause both polarization in beliefs and devaluation of expert testimony
What appears to be rampant dogmatism could be just as well explained by the nonrandom walk in evidence-gathering. This explanation better matches the empirical evidence on how people behave on social media platforms
Summary
Humans learn useful things by communicating with one another without having to directly experiment and learn from the world. Suppose Simone can receive one of three possible signals, a,b, or c, by chatting with somebody on the street (a), reading an op-ed in the first newspaper he finds (b), or casually listening to talk radio (c) Each of these pieces of evidence is a signal that Simone can use to update his credence, where s∈fa, b, cg. Simone knows that the evidence in a, b, c is merely suggestive on its own and cannot alone give him confidence This is because the likelihood distribution functions of receiving these signals under conditions where φ is true or φ is false are not very informative. Simone wanders the streets a little while longer, picking up more signals, but because none have the same authority and epistemic influence as Dave’s signal, Simone’s updating never again veers very far from 0:101 He returns to his planet fairly confident that the president is making good policy decisions. His beliefs are informed by the well-honed testimony of Dave
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