Contrarians judged mad after being proven right (John Hempton)

Finance does not seem to me to produce clean examples because there is such a strong incentive to talk one's book. People who owned the company and immediately believed the report had a strong incentive to condemn the report so that they could sell first. (this is illegal, but it's easy to maintain plausible deniability)

That does not address the title of the post, still being judged mad after being proven right, but I don't see that discussed in Hempton's post, let alone JG's excerpts, just flatly asserted.

I just wanted to point out that I thought the article was going a different direction than it ended up going based off of misinterpreting the word 'mad'. I thought that it was going to be about a study that showed some kind of persecution complex in the contrarian who was unable to derive joy from being proven right. Maybe it was just me affected this way, but that threw me off until the last paragraph or so.

I have normalized your formatting.

I'm not certain that the Sino Forest 'case' is a very good one for use here, from reading the lw'er's "tl;dr" version of the full article.

Consider: While the "source" of information should not be used to evaluate the probability of that information's accuracy, the manner in which information is delivered should. If an improper format of accreditation is used; if obvious and overt logical fallacies are present -- that information would rightly be discounted from any estimate of the accuracy of a statement.

For example; I consider myself a strong/gnostic atheist. So for me, it is obvious that "atheism" is the "correct" answer. Should I encounter someone, however, whose sole reason for being an atheist was because their little sister died (WARNING: TVTROPES.org link!!) -- I would be forced to tell that person ve was being a complete moron, and that nobody should listen to ver reasoning.

The mere accident of a conclusion coinciding with the truth does not make that conclusion justified. As part of the assessment tools of judging the accreditation weighting we provide any given input, the 'proper indicators of subject-expertise' should weigh in highly. If a hobo with a speech impediment walks up to me on the street and tells me he's got a surefire plan for making money on the stock-market written on the back of a Subway's wrapper, I'm not going to be inclined to waste my time reading it. On the other hand, if a man makes the news from raking in billions over the course of a week from mere thousands and then offers me a secret algorithm that's the source of his wealth, I'm going to take him quite seriously: because he's got the right indicators of veracity of his beliefs.

Now, that being said -- there needs to be a means to re-weight assessments of credulity of statemets to account for outlier positions. I would tend to believe that willingness to publicize resources and citing credible sources of data, rigorousness fo documentation of 'radical' claims, and so one would be useful to this end.

As Sagan said: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." While we should remember that's just a heuristic -- I don't know that I see a problem here. Limited information and constant need for reassessment based on it means mistakes will be made. They are unavoidable. Do not let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

This is madness.