Weighting Provokers

I recently had a conversation with a friend who was telling me about his frustration with information around the Covid vaccines. He told me about a journalist who had been banned from Twitter (was recently reinstated) for "telling the truth." Namely, reporting that nothing in the original Pfizer trials showed any impact on transmission. 

We've been lied to, he told me.

I asked where he heard this, even though I already knew the answer. And that answer was the Joe Rogan Podcast.

I spent several seconds Googling this claim and sent him a link from Reuters that provided some clarifcation. (Yes, to obtain emergency authorization from the FDA you do not need to prove transmission reduction, only that it's safe and reduces fatalities and hospitalizations. Also, later studies showed the vaccine did reduce transmission in Covid Classic, something the Rogan journalist did not report on.)

Yet despite all this, I still kinda like Joe Rogan. 

The whole conversation reaffirmed for me why I trust my views more than my friend's. By listening to Joe Rogan's podcast, my friend hears voices outside the mainstream that others may be missing. But by not listening to mainstream media, or even fact-checking the claims he hears, he's missing a lot of details that provide more clarity and is unable to build a good consensus of opinion.

I listen to the mainstream and the rogues, but I need to be more aware how I divvy up my attention. I am reminded of the blog post about explainers, illuminators, and provokers. Joe Rogan is a provoker. David Leonhardt or Derek Thompson are explainers. Noah Smith and Matt Iglesias are illuminators. And I think they are all important.

Bet on it

Let's say at the beginning of the 2021 NBA season, I wanted to bet on how many games I thought the Boston Celtics would win. If I listened to the mainstream consensus. I would have guessed that they would win about half their games, or 41.

But what if I had listened to a rogue prognosticator, who was convinced that the new head coach's defensive scheme and tough-love approach was going to shock people and that this team was going to win  65 games? 

Well, he would've been wrong, but he would have updated my priors more in his direction and probably moved my prediction from the consensus of 41 wins to something like 51, which is exactly how many games they won on their way to the NBA Finals that year.

But if I only listened to the provokers, I'd just hear extreme predictions like 65 wins or 12 wins, nothing tempered by the consensus that would actually get me closer to the true total of 51.

So I build my model similar to Nassim Taleb's barbell approach to investing: 80% in safe bonds and 20% in high-risk, high-reward stocks. The NYT reporters are the bonds, the Joe Rogan Podcast guests are the stocks. 

I used to think that intellectual diversity was more important but I think this framing is better. (Or maybe you meld the two and ensure there is intellectual diversity among your explainers and your provokers.) I also think there is a distinction, that some may say doesn't exist, between rogues and conflict entrepreneurs—the latter being people who lie or distort to create a narrative that affirms the priors of their audience and always frames the outgroup as the enemy. Whereas rogues take their contrarian position because it's what they really believe, no matter how unpopular it makes them.

I think my model is pretty good, and I will continue to update it as necessary, but I also understand that most people aren't building out a model when they choose where they get their news from. This is something that social media could take a more active approach with, building users' algorithms to reflect this model in their feed rather than it being an intellectual bubble.