Social incentives affecting beliefs

For people reading this site, the most vivid analogy here might be being forced to live in a town full of religious hicks in the south of the USA, with minimal contact with the outside world. (I've heard from reliable sources that the stereotypes about the South are accurate.)

I'd caution against using this as an example. Not just because it's a stereotype, or just because there's a wide variation in that stereotype, but because it's neither the most effective or the most common level of social pressure that inspires conformity. When you say "Bible-Thumping Redneck", readers will jump to some level of coercion between Inherit the Wind, and a literal torch-and-pitchfork-wielding mob. That's meaningful, but it's also an iceberg situation: the most obvious answer is not the full answer, and can distract you from the full answer. It tempts folk to think about social incentives that affect expression of belief, rather than social incentives that alter beliefs themselves.

A good deal of effective social conformity is far more subtle. You need a much greater form of self-introspection to counter this attribute than you'd expect, and it's far more pervasive than your example would suggest.

My strategy is to associate my weird beliefs with the high status people who hold them and use it to curtail non-productive arguments. e.g. "I don't have much expertise in this area myself, but I trust X who studies this problem professionally."

Practice coming across as "eccentric" rather than "kooky" when explaining your weird ideas, and state them confidently as if they're naturally and obviously true, to decrease status loss effects.

This only works if you're already high status. If you're low status you come across as attention-seeking.

Being wrong is correlated with using an authority heuristic. If you encounter someone who you're sure is wrong, consider using an authoritative source who agrees with you. Attempt to establish that source's authoritativeness before you reveal that source agrees with you.

Worst case scenario, that other person still disagrees, but you only pay for "listening to the wrong guy", which I expect (confidence 95%) is less expensive in the median case.

For people reading this site, the most vivid analogy here might be being forced to live in a town full of religious hicks in the south of the USA, with minimal contact with the outside world.

A scenario much more available for the Libertarian readers would be living in an area and in broad social circles dominated by Progressives.

Nonjudgemental people may help you socially with trying new ideas, but will not help you epistemically with finding the correct ones. You will have to reinvent every wheel alone. If you have unlimited time, go ahead. Otherwise, it is better to find people who are a bit judgemental -- who have a preference for correct beliefs.

Of course, replacing judgemental people with a preference for incorrect beliefs by nonjudgemental people is an improvement. But sometimes you can do much better than this.

Maybe this is what happens to many people: they replace the judgemental people with incorrect beliefs by nonjudgemental people, they realize the improvement... but then they can't improve further because their heuristics says that "nonjudgemental is best". Noise can be better than active misinformation, but signal can be even better than noise. But when most of your experience is with active misinformation, all signals seem dangerous.

For people reading this site, the most vivid analogy here might be being forced to live in a town full of religious hicks in the south of the USA, with minimal contact with the outside world. (I've heard from reliable sources that the stereotypes about the South are accurate.)

They're such vapid hicks, I bet they believe negative stereotypes about large groups of people just because someone who shares their worldview assures them they are accurate.

Ugh they're such evil mutants! Good thing nothing like that happens on Less Wrong.

Fight the restoring force with leverage. Make friends with the local priest and affect the congregation through him. Most instrumental rationality techniques are compatible with religion. You can consider your options once you gain status.

For people reading this site, the most vivid analogy here might be being forced to live in a town full of religious hicks in the south of the USA, with minimal contact with the outside world. (I've heard from reliable sources that the stereotypes about the South are accurate.) Not many of us would choose to do this voluntarily.

I have lived in a town full of religious hicks in the South, and I have many weird beliefs. My experience was that while it did cost me social status, it wasn't that important to me, and it would have been significantly more unpleasant to conceal my beliefs.

Does anyone have more bizarre / counterintuitive approaches? Those three seem fairly obvious; indeed I'm pretty confident I've witnessed the first two in others (and applied all myself at one time or another)

If you're trying to help a group have accurate beliefs on aggregate, stay nonjudgmental so that the forces pulling people towards conventional wisdom will be lower, and they'll be more influenced by the evidence they encounter as opposed to the incentives they encounter. You may say "well, I'm only judgmental towards peoples' beliefs when they're incorrect."

The problem with giving rationalists this kind of advice is that it lowers the average sanity of the people defining conventional wisdom.

But even if you happen to be perfect at figuring out which beliefs are incorrect, this is still a bad idea. If I'm trying to figure out whether to officially adopt some belief as part of my thinking, I'll calculate my expected social cost of holding the belief using the probability that it's incorrect times the penalty in the case where it's incorrect. So even punishing only the incorrect beliefs will counterfactually decrease the rate of people holding unusual beliefs.

This argument seems to assume, contra the first sentence, that I am coming down on the side of the received opinion each time, rather than on the side of the correct opinion.

If you're trying to help a group have accurate beliefs on aggregate, stay nonjudgmental so that the forces pulling people towards conventional wisdom will be lower, and they'll be more influenced by the evidence they encounter as opposed to the incentives they encounter. You may say "well, I'm only judgmental towards peoples' beliefs when they're incorrect." But even if you happen to be perfect at figuring out which beliefs are incorrect, this is still a bad idea. If I'm trying to figure out whether to officially adopt some belief as part of my thinking, I'll calculate my expected social cost of holding the belief using the probability that it's incorrect times the penalty in the case where it's incorrect. So even punishing only the incorrect beliefs will counterfactually decrease the rate of people holding unusual beliefs.

There are already some heuristics that allow you to nudge people in a direction where they are more likely to accept your arguments. However, these techniques are all about getting people to like you, in effect, taking advantage of their cognitive biases, so it might seem to straddle that line of Dark Arts. One was actually posted pretty recently: Have the person tell a self-affirming thing about themselves before trying to convince them of your point of view. Or ask them for a favor or their opinion on something. Another way to get people to like you is to uncover likable things about the person; the Dark Arts version of that would be something like Barnum statements.

If anything, these persuasion techniques will increase your social capital so that you have more to spend on having beliefs that don't quite mesh with the group's center.

In my experience the 'social cost' tends to be paid by people trying to push (hard) concepts and ideas that are, often at least, very true and useful, but when it is not necessarily relevant to the conversation or the person isn't interested.

No price is due -- if anything, the opposite -- as long as you follow a few basic rules, and are able to explain your ideas eloquently and succinctly (and if you can't -- should you be talking about it at all?)

A curse of intelligent people seems to be to want to try to 'show' everyone just how smart they are by talking about subjects they don't totally understand, or else subjects that are irrelevant to whatever situation they are in.

A discussion on Bayesian Reasoning may be very appropriate in certain college or high school academic situations, but repeatedly bringing it up in all sorts of casual conversations will cause social harm to the individual refusing to follow social expectations in this are

If you keep your weird ideas to yourself, you'll have to lead a double life of secret constructed knowledge on the one hand and public facade on the other.

I kinda think most people have to hide some of their beliefs. It doesn't feel like a facade to me, just a fact of life you've got to live with.

This is where the divide between epistemic vs. instrumental rationality is so important. If you truly practice instrumental rationality, none of this even enters into the discussion. You should not have to pay any social cost for being rational vs. not being so.