Losing Faith In Contrarianism

There are institutional incentives that make contrarian views that catch on mostly wrong.

If you spend a lot of time in the blogosphere, you’ll find a great deal of people expressing contrarian views. If you hang out in the circles that I do, you’ll probably have heard of Yudkowsky say that dieting doesn’t really work, Guzey say that sleep is overrated, Hanson argue that medicine doesn’t improve health, various people argue for the lab leak, others argue for hereditarianism, Caplan argue that mental illness is mostly just aberrant preferences and education doesn’t work, and various other people expressing contrarian views. Often, very smart people—like Robin Hanson—will write long posts defending these views, other people will have criticisms, and it will all be such a tangled mess that you don’t really know what to think about them.

For a while, I took a lot of these contrarian views pretty seriously. If I’d had to bet 6-months ago, I’d have bet on the lab leak, at maybe 2 to 1 odds. I’d have had significant credence in Hanson’s view that healthcare doesn’t improve health until pretty recently, when Scott released his post explaining why it is wrong.

Over time, though, I’ve become much less sympathetic to these contrarian views. It’s become increasingly obvious that the things that make them catch on are unrelated to their truth. People like being provocative and tearing down sacred cows—as a result, when a smart articulate person comes along defending some contrarian view—perhaps one claiming that something we think is valuable is really worthless—the view spreads like wildfire, even if it’s pretty implausible.

Sam Atis has an article titled The Case Against Public Intellectuals. He starts it by noting a surprising fact: lots of his friends think education has no benefits. This isn’t because they’ve done a thorough investigation of the literature—it’s because they’ve read Bryan Caplan’s book arguing for that thesis. Atis notes that there’s a literature review finding that education has significant benefits, yet it’s written by boring academics, so no one has read it. Everyone wants to read the contrarians who criticize education—no one wants to read the boring lit reviews that say what we believed about education all along is right.

Sam is right, yet I think he understates the problem. There are various topics where arguing for one side of them is inherently interesting, yet arguing for the other side is boring. There are a lot of people who read Austian economics blogs, yet no one reads (or writes) anti-Austrian economics blogs. That’s because there are a lot of fans of Austrians economics—people who are willing to read blogs on the subject—but almost no one who is really invested in Austrian economics being wrong. So as a result, in general, the structural incentives of the blogosphere favor being a contrarian.

Thus, you should expect the sense of the debate you get, unless you peruse the academic literature in depth surrounding some topic, to be wildly skewed towards contrarian views. And I think this is exactly what we observe.

I’ve seen the contrarians be wrong over and over again—and this is what really made me lose faith in them. Whenever I looked more into a topic, whenever I got to the bottom of the full debate, it always seemed like the contrarian case fell apart.

It’s easy for contrarians to portray their opponents as the kind of milquetoast bureaucrats who aren’t very smart and follow the consensus just because it is the consensus. If Bryan Caplan has a disagreement with a random administrator, I trust that Bryan Caplan’s probably right, because he’s smarter and cares more about ideas.

But what I’ve come to realize is that the mainstream view that’s supported by most of the academics tends to be supported by some really smart people. Caplan’s view isn’t just opposed by the bureaucrats and teachers—it’s opposed by the type of obsessive autist who does a lit review on the effect of education. And while I’ll bet in favor of Caplan against Campus administrators, I would never make a mistake like betting against the obsessive high-IQ autists.

Sam Atis—a super forecaster—had a piece arguing against The Case Against Education, but it got eaten by a substack glitch. Reading his piece left me pretty sure that Bryan was wrong—especially after consulting a friend who knows quite a bit about these things. After reading it, I came away pretty confident that Caplan was wrong.

This is very far from the only case; I’ve watched the contrarian’s cases fall apart over and over again. Reading Alexey Guzey’s theses on sleep left me undecided—but then Natania’s counter-theses on sleep left me quite confident that Guzey is wrong. Guzey’s case turns out to be shockingly weak and opposed by a quite major mountain of evidence.

Similarly, now that I’ve read through Scott’s response to Hanson on medicine, I’d bet at upwards of 9 to 1 odds that Hanson is wrong about it. There’s an abundance of evidence that medicine has dramatically improved health outcomes, from well-done randomized trials to the fact that people are surviving more from almost all diseases. Hanson’s studies don’t even really support what he says when examined closely.

Similarly, the lab leak theory—one of the more widely accepted and plausible contrarian views—also doesn’t survive careful scrutiny. It’s easy to think it’s probably right when your perception is that the disagreement is between people like Saar Wilf and government bureaucrats like Fauci. But when you realize that some of the anti-lab leak people are obsessive autists who have studied the topic a truly mind-boggling amount, and don’t have any social or financial stake in the outcome, it’s hard to be confident that they’re wrong.

I read through the lab-leak debates in some depth, reading Scott’s blog, Rootclaim’s response, Scott’s response, and various other pieces. And my conclusion was that the lab-leak view was far, far less plausible than the zoonosis view. The lab leak view has no good explanation of why all the early cases were at the wet market and why the heat map clearly shows the wet market as the place where the pandemic started.

The contrarian’s enemy is not only random conformists. It’s also ridiculously smart people who have studied the topic in incredible depth and concluded that they’re wrong. And as we all know from certain creative offshoots of rock, paper, scissors, high-IQ mega autists beats public intellectual.

I read through the Caplan v Alexander debate about mental illness. And I concluded that Caplan wasn’t just wrong, he was clearly and egregiously wrong (I even wrote an article about it). This is not to beat up on Caplan—I generally think he’s one of the better contrarians. But the consensus view often turns out to be right on these things.

Similarly, there are a lot of people like Steve Sailer and Emil Kierkegaard arguing that there are racial gaps in intelligence, based on genetics. But when I read them on other stuff, they’re just not great thinkers. In contrast, while Jay M’s blog isn’t as popular or as fun to read for most people, he has a good piece arguing pretty convincingly against the genetic explanation of the gap. The author isn’t a conformist—his other articles express various controversial views about race. Yet he did a thorough deep dive into the literature and concluded that the environmental explanation is most plausible. I’ve also chatted with him and he’s very smart and good at thinking, unlike, I think, Kirkegaard and Sailer (I could be wrong about that—I don’t know them that well). I don’t have the statistical acumen to really evaluate the debate, but I do get the same sense—that while popular contrarians with widely read blogs say one thing, the balance of evidence doesn’t support that view.

Many more people read Kirkegaard and Sailer because expressing the conformist view on the topic is much less interesting than expressing the contrarian view. Most of the people who believe the gap is environmental don’t much want to argue about it, so almost all the people who write things about it are people who believe the genetic explanation of the gap. Very few people want to read articles saying “here are 10,000 words showing that the view you reject by calling it racist pseudoscience is actually conflicted by the majority of the evidence.”

I could run through more examples but the point should be clear. Whenever I look more into contrarian theories, my credence in them drops dramatically and the case for them falls apart completely. They spread extremely rapidly as long as they have even a few smart, articulate proponents who are willing to write things in support of them. The obsessive autists who have spent 10,000 hours researching the topic and writing boring articles in support of the mainstream position are left ignored.