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Sam Atis's avatar

This is a good point, although I think in many cases people just won't have a strong opinion on something. E.g. if I had asked one of the Caplan readers whether they thought education actually gave people useful skills before they had read Caplan, I assume they would have said something along the lines of 'I would assume education does give people useful skills, but it isn't something I really know a lot about', whereas now the response is basically 'It seems very likely that the evidence that the human capital gains from education are hugely overstated'.

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Matthew Ritter's avatar

Oh that’s interesting; looks like we have hugely different priors on the effect of content-volume in opinion-strength. I’d be 50/50 in the question among the *very* small group of people who consider epistemic humility a virtue. And maybe that’s the implied context of this blog.

Outside of that, as long as there is a keyword like “education” in the question, I strongly suspect people will have a confident opinion regardless of time spent consuming/considering relevant content.

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Sam Atis's avatar

I guess it depends on how you framed the question, I think if I hinted at the fact that some academics took the signalling model seriously, people I know would not dismiss it out of hand (nor would they instantly back it), whereas if I casually asked whether they reckon it's possible that education doesn't actually do much for people, they might push back on that strongly if I didn't allude to some broader academic debate. But it's true that the people I know might have much more of a tendency towards epistemic humility than most people, I'm not sure.

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Matthew Ritter's avatar

I’d have to nail down some logistics, but I could imagine sending out a poll to a few general communities I am part of. Definitely open to ideas about how to frame the question, they almost certainly will not have heard of Caplan‘s book

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Sam Atis's avatar

Sure, sounds fun!

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