In a much-discussed post at one of my favorite blogs, Language Log, Mark Liberman christens a new game:
We might call this the Pundit’s Dilemma — a game, like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which the player’s best move always seems to be to take the low road, and in which the aggregate welfare of the community always seems fated to fall. And this isn’t just a game for pundits. Scientists face similar choices every day, in deciding whether to over-sell their results, or for that matter to manufacture results for optimal appeal.
(Aside on the game name game: when I was a first-year PhD student at Berkeley, Matthew Rabin taught us game theory. As if to remove all illusion that what we were studying was connected to reality, every game we analyzed in class was given a name according to his system of “stochastic lexicography.” Stochastic lexicography means randomly picking two words out of the dictionary and using them as the name of the game under study. So, for example, instead of studying “job market signaling” we studied something like “rusty succotash.” I wonder if any of our readers remember some of the game names from that class.)
(Stay tuned for my next Matthew Rabin story which will involve a hackey sack and a bodily fluid.)
There is indeed a strong incentive for pundits to distort what they say, and it has the flavor of contrarianism. Its based on an old paper by Prendergast and Stole (requires JSTOR sorry. Support Open Access publishing.) Suppose that what pundits want is to convince the world that they are smart. (Perhaps they want to influence policy. They will be influential later only if they can prove they are smart today. So today the details of what they are saying matters less than whether what they are saying is perceived to be smart.)
The thing about being really smart is that it means you are talking to people who aren’t as smart as you. (Sandeep faces this problem all the time.) So they can’t verify whether what you are saying is really true (especially when we are talking about climate change policies where if we ever do find out who was right, it will be well past the time that punditry is a profitable enterprise.) But one thing the audience knows is that smart pundits can figure out things that lesser pundits cannot. That means that the only way a smart pundit can demonstrate to his not-so-smart audience that he is smart is by saying things different than what his lesser colleagues are saying, i.e. to be a contrarian.
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October 21, 2009 at 10:59 pm
Federico
On stochastic lexicography, my favorite was “redolent kingcup.” A great game.
October 21, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Susan Simpson
Redolent kingcup sounds /almost/ like a game that’d be fun to play…
And this explanation of the Pundit’s Dilemma does sound about right, but my impression on it has always been that it was just pundits capitalizing on everyone’s desire to be a special little snowflake who Got it Right when everyone got it wrong.
It’s just not quite as satisfying to be correct when everyone else is correct as well. Following a Contrarian creates a sense of community that following a Mainstream does not.
October 22, 2009 at 3:10 am
M.G. in Progress
What about our Bandit’s dilemma in Italy?
http://mgiannini.blogspot.com/2009/10/bandits-dilemma-of-berlusconi.html
October 22, 2009 at 4:46 am
Rusty succotash
[…] on Cheap Talk, Jeff recounts being taught game theory by Matthew Rabin: As if to remove all illusion that what we were studying […]
October 22, 2009 at 6:54 am
Esprit de contradiction « Rationalité Limitée
[…] pas trop juste par plaisir de contredire mon interlocuteur (oui, c’est pas bien je sais). Jeff Ely sur Cheap Talk donne une explication à l’esprit de contradiction […]
October 22, 2009 at 7:30 am
gappy
Jeff, I think the thesis of the post is mostly correct, but I dispute the statement that
“the only way a smart pundit can demonstrate to his not-so-smart audience that he is smart is by saying things different than what his lesser colleagues are saying, i.e. to be a contrarian.”
A pundit usually produces (or better, secretes, as part of his metabolic process) both a reasoning process and a normative/descriptive thesis.
The audience is unable to verify the prediction AND the thesis of the pundit. But the pundit also interact with her peers, who can at least verify the reasoning. If the pundit is too contrarian, he will be discredited by the entire community. If the pundit wants to keep her status and not be relegated to the status of a fringe figure, its best strategy may be not to be contrarian all the time, or at least not to be contrarian against universally held beliefs among pundits. Perhaps she will seek the support of a minority of the pundit community. I have not thought this out. I am just saying you may be abstracting away too much.
October 22, 2009 at 6:03 pm
przemek
I think the same is true of academia, it’s just that when an academic tries to be contrarian (the academic term for which is “counterintuitive”), her job is that much harder because her audience (and her peers) are smarter than the pundits’. But, I still think that much of game-theoretic modeling in social sciences is done mostly to show off how well you can fit something that doesn’t seem to fit the framework, into the framework–which proves how clever you are.