On the economizing of knowledge

Virtual Economics

What for the sake of shorthand we call "trust" in media is a rational consumer choice of an apparently reliable source that will do the hard labour of validation for us. People like to appear consistent to both themselves and others (see as ever Cialdini's Influence for the argument) and it isn't rational for them to laboriously check sources themselves every time they want some information. Hence (if you'll forgive some simplification) "trust" in media and especially in a particular newspaper; hence minimal instances of people switching away again from Google; hence this relatively targeted form of rational ignorance that leads people to, quite reasonably, engage as infrequently as possible in the disruptive process of deciding what source of information to trust and then sticking with it.

Emphasis added by me.

This is the side of economics that is often obscured by the common understanding of the "rational actor". As Thomas Sowell makes clear in Knowledge and Decisions, and as I have to some extent examined in Science as the Division of Labor, information is costly and therefore our acquisition of it must be economized.

Often it makes perfect sense to use the same stores or rely on the same sources repeatedly, simply because we have accumulated enough experience with them to have a greater understanding of both their strengths and faults than we would if we simply decided to set out and attempt to start from scratch somewhere else.

Experience is the great economizer of knowledge; and tradition is the framework that shapes all experience. As Edmund Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France;

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages.

Devoid of context, individual reason is a joke. One cannot be thrown into a circumstance without any points of reference and be expected to reason their way into a proper understanding of the situation.

That which has stood the test of time provides us with our context. The time frame varies, from the two plus years that I have been blogging, to the handful of years that I have been using Google as my primary seach engine, and beyond, to the ages that have witnessed the development of human institutions and traditions.

Science is not something that we trust because we can reason our way to a logical proof that it must be trusted. We trust the schools of scientists because, while the tradition of science encompasses a timeframe that is short relative to the duration of human history, it has been tremendously successful at producing results, on a consistent basis, for hundreds of years.

Read the whole article at Virtual Economics, it's very well written.