Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views

This is an extremely smug and tone-deaf take on the deterioration of trust in public health institutions and messaging.

They reference covid in their abstract, so it's fair game to discuss here: where was the scientific objective-truth-machine when the Noble Lies[0] where being told? It was silent and complicit.

The general public is not as knowledgeable as experts, but they can sense when they're being lied to, or when political bias is distorting the messaging, and they don't like it. When they can't trust the experts, they fall back on their own lack of knowledge, for which they are now being mocked. But lying to and manipulating people means they won't trust you, no matter how much of an expert you provably are.

This study seems to want to make it simply about the Dunning-Kruger[1] effect, which puts most of the blame on the average person, while ignoring why people feel like they can't trust experts in the first place.

  0. https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html
  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

to tease out the nuance, the mechanism of mainstreaming isn't an extension of stupidity (ignorance is certainly a more accurate term), but of limited focus and stress. most people don't spend much time thinking about the wider world and how it should work very deeply, so they follow the herd on most things, because it's a decent heuristic and it has a social benefit.

it's a literal luxury to have enough time and mental space to think for more than a few minutes on any given issue. that's one of the most valuable "legs up" that wealth gives you, not so much the money itself, but the room to think (and unfortunately, often to try to manipulate the world around you in a self-serving/self-centered way--the corrupting of personal integrity that's as old as time).

There's dangers at both ends of the spectrum.

Much of our culture applauds the anti-consensus actor, the lone visionary who goes ahead despite the disapproval of the crowd. And that's understandable. As Spike Milligan put it "Progress is like an old car. It takes a crank to get things started." Progress depends upon the unreasonable man. What looks like "knowledge over-confidence" turns out to be "justified confidence" in widely unrecognised truths. Further, in entrepreneurial circles, if you're prepared to risk your own money and time on a crazed venture then that's celebrated.

But in reality you create risks to externalities far beyond your own wallet. Such a culture absolves the reckless engineer of causing great harms because they are "a genius" and we want to ride their coat tails. Some of this seeped into Silicon Valley culture where many tech people see the digital world as their own personal laboratory to experiment on masses like bugs in a petri dish.

This could be contrasted with the socially conscious non-consensus actor, who departs from crowd wisdom at great personal loss and just wants to be left alone to do their own thing. That's a different breed of individualism. It's often rooted in falliblism rather than over-confidence. Such a person, out of wisdom, knows how stupid they can be themself, and sees the crowd as no better.

I would say dangers at the other end of the spectrum, of blind unthinking assent, group-think, conflict avoidance, is much better documented and understood. Whether that's a negative or positive depends on the context. On a frontier rugged individualism is an asset while more measured conformity tends to work in long established communities. The contrast of the North American frontiersman and the Nordic observer of small town "Jante Law" is marked.

Similarly, people don't want to evaluate interesting restaurants, they want to jump on the bandwagon known as Yelp or Google reviews. There's something wrong with jumping on the bandwagon, but there's more right than wrong.

What the study is describing is a psychological trait known as dogmatism.

You might be familiar with the words "dogma" or "dogmatic" in their religious sense: a set of beliefs that members of a religion are expected to accept as true.

But there is another, broader way that "dogmatic" is used that does not necessarily have to do with religious dogma.

In psychology, dogmatism is a defined as exhibiting great certainty about the correctness of one's views and an unwillingness to consider new evidence, or an unwillingness to adjust one's views in light of new evidence.

Last year I read about a fascinating 2020 study that measures dogmatism in a novel way, and I created a little web app that adapts the study's technique to determine your own level of dogmatism:

https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/dogmatism.html

Going back to the 2022 study that OP posted, one thing that irks me is the way the authors lump all religious belief into one bucket:

> Because several issues that we examine have come into conflict with religious thinking, and because religion can itself be a polarizing factor for attitudes and beliefs, we also test for an attenuation for issues more associated with religiosity.

I'm Catholic, so that makes me religious. But I have friends who are Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Baha'i, etc., and their belief systems are vastly different than mine. Yet we all have this trait "religiosity" that really tells us very little about what any of us believe. The question the study uses -- "How important is religion in your life?" -- to gauge religiosity, without making any distinctions between vastly different religious beliefs and practices, is bizarre to me. I can't help but be skeptical that religiosity in the abstract tells us anything meaningful.