In this new post I highlight my five favourite academic articles from last year, which range over topics like political ideology, religion, misinformation, reputation management, and intellectual humility: . Thread: 1/6 conspicuouscognition.com/p/my-five-favo…
#1: 'Strange Bedfellows: The Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems' by @DavidPinsof David Sears and @haselton. A brilliant, evolutionarily plausible, parsimonious - and deeply cynical - theory of political belief systems. 2/6tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

Should we trust misinformation experts to decide what counts as misinformation? In this new essay I give some reasons for scepticism: . Thread: (1/15) conspicuouscognition.com/p/should-we-tr…
First, some context. A few weeks ago I published an essay 👇 arguing that misinformation research confronts a dilemma when it comes to answering its most basic definitional question: What *is* misinformation? 2/15
conspicuouscognition.com/p/misinformati…

Last week the World Economic Forum published its 'Global Risk Report' identifying misinformation and disinformation as the *top global threats over the next two years*. In this essay I argue its ranking is either wrong or so confused it's not even wrong: conspicuouscognition.com/p/misinformati…
Some background: Since 2016 (Brexit and the election of Trump), policy makers, experts, and social scientists have been gripped by panic about the political harms of disinformation and misinformation. Against this backdrop, the World Economic Forum's ranking is not surprising.

I'm going to be writing here 👇 ≈weekly this year. In this first post I introduce the blog, explain its title 'Conspicuous Cognition', and outline why the pursuit of social approval drives the evolutionary weirdness of human behaviour and thought. 1/7
conspicuouscognition.com/p/conspicuous-…
The blog is an experiment. I like writing, I like publicly engaging with ideas and debates, and now that I have a permanent academic job I can express and argue for controversial takes - which I will be doing - with less fear of consequences. 2/7

New essay: I argue that misinformation is often better viewed as a symptom of deep societal problems rather than their cause. When that’s true, interventions like debunking and censorship are unlikely to help – and might make things worse. (1/15)
iai.tv/articles/misin… The central intuition driving the modern misinformation panic is that people – specifically *other* people 👇 – are gullible and hence easily brainwashed into holding false beliefs. This idea is wrong. (2/15) journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

When it comes to dis/misinformation research, it confronts a dilemma: in order to be viewed as legitimate and win broad public support, it must restrict its focus to extremely clear-cut cases such as fake news, bizarre conspiracy theories and easily-demonstrable falsehoods. 1/11 The problem is that such content is rare and not very consequential. Many people ignore it or engage with it for reasons independent of belief, and the small minority of the population who seek it out do so because of pre-existing traits, beliefs and dispositions. 2/11

According to this thread, anyone who is sceptical that emotionality (the tendency to evoke emotions) is a fingerprint of misinformation is simply ignorant of scientific consensus on the topic. I disagree and would like to explain why:

https://twitter.com/Sander_vdLinden/status/1698059698514092391

First, it's important to be clear about which claim is at dispute. If emotionality is a fingerprint of misinformation, misinformation on average must exhibit higher rates of emotionality than reliable information. That's a striking claim which if true has important implications

In many discussions distinguishing misinformation and disinformation, it’s assumed there is a clean distinction between innocent mistakes and intentional deception. This is wrong: people often sincerely embrace the self-serving beliefs they are motivated to propagate to others. That someone is pushing an unfounded but self-serving narrative does not mean they are *insincere*. Your sincere beliefs, including those you most strongly identify with, often result from deep-rooted psychological tendencies specialised for propaganda and impression management.

Is misinformation a dangerous virus? Are we living through an infodemic? Is there a vaccine for misinformation? In this review of Sander van der Linden's (@Sander_vdLinden) new book 'Foolproof', I argue that the answer to these questions is "no". A thread:
bostonreview.net/articles/the-f… Before going into some objections, let me say that I recommend the book. It's extremely interesting, and it provides an exceptionally clear and informative overview of modern misinformation research. However, I do strongly disagree with its overall perspective.

What I find striking about Tucker Carlson is this: It was recently revealed from private text messages that he hates Trump and thinks of him as a “demonic force”. Despite this, he *served as one of Trump's most loyal and effective public propagandists for years*.

https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1656037032538390530

This information isn't difficult to find. A quick google search would suffice. In ordinary life, if you discovered that someone (a friend, a colleague) had engaged in that level of extreme, psychopathic, self-interested deception, you would lose all trust in them.

Contra Naomi Klein, I think the simpler, more plausible explanation for why people use the term "hallucination" to describe the mistaken outputs of generative AI is because the outputs resemble hallucinations in some respects.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/… And I think the more likely explanation for why some people are optimistic about AI is because they are persuaded by its potential. And I am sceptical that training AI on existing human knowledge constitutes "the most consequential theft in human history."

Lots of people seem to be really angry about this thread. (Some people liked the thread as well but naturally my brain ignores that). I stand by the thread, but I should have been clearer on the following: (1/7)

https://twitter.com/danwilliamsphil/status/1568956062543265792

I *don’t* think most people are ignorant when it comes to answering these questions, or that only an elite minority knows (e.g.) how many moons our planet has. As I said (in fact, the *first* thing I said) in the thread: I think these answers are *obviously cherry picked*.(2/7)

I *hate* videos like this, designed to mock ordinary people & make them look stupid. The most obvious point is that the interviews are cherry picked from a much bigger sample but made to look as if they're representative of people’s responses. But setting that aside…(1/5)

https://twitter.com/BomsteinRick/status/1568613300610662401

First, being informed about pointless abstract facts about the world is a status symbol among highly-educated exam takers that constitute society’s elite. Most people don’t care, and have way more important things going on in their lives to bother acquiring this knowledge. (2/5)

I wrote a short piece on why the recent panic surrounding misinformation is misguided and how the concept of rationalisation markets is superior for understanding many forms of epistemic dysfunction in political and cultural media (1/17). blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocial… The basic idea: In recent years - especially since 2016 - there has been widespread alarm that the general public are being overwhelmed by exposure to false claims, which is leading them to make bad political and life decisions. (2/17)

Very interesting 2005 review of "The Economy of Esteem" by @tylercowen.
"The desire for esteem can induce us to give to charity, engage in path-breaking scientific research, join voluntary associations, or simply be a decent human being or parent."
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117… "Esteem-seeking may be a central reason why voluntary institutions supply public goods to the extent they do. General steps to magnify the importance of esteem therefore may have beneficial social consequences."

New open access paper: "The Marketplace of Rationalizations". The basic idea: Motivated reasoning is subject to a rationalization constraint: people can only convince themselves of beliefs for which they can find appropriate rationalizations. (1/16)

cambridge.org/core/journals/… When preferences for similar beliefs are widespread, this constraint gives rise to *rationalization markets* in which agents compete to produce justifications of widely desired beliefs in exchange for money and social rewards such as attention and status. (2/16)

The social world is unimaginably complex, mostly unpredictable at even short timescales, and viewed through extremely limited information & motivational biases. It's impossible to reconcile these banalities with the typical level of confidence we have in our political beliefs. So why the misalignment between the beliefs that we should hold if we were intellectually responsible and the beliefs that we actually hold?

What I tried to get across in this short segment (starting at roughly 1:50): Very often people try to explain misinformation in terms of factors like a lack of information, irrationality, gullibility, and propaganda. 1/11 bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0… In many cases, though, the misinformation is bound up with people's identities, and provides a means of signalling ingroup membership and allegiance... 2/11