I have a new working paper up today on my writing page on dialectic belief formation. It’s a model of a person who forms beliefs based on a heuristic that takes a weighted average of the best and worst case explanations for observed data. The weights carry a penalty for the more unlikely explanation, captured in the model by a skepticism parameter. 

I’m arguing that a person who is excessively credulous of far-fetched explanations looks a lot like the type of exploitable, behaviorally anomalous person we see in data across a few superficially different applications: non-Bayesian belief formation, subjective probability assessment, and political spin. 

As an added bonus, I cite, among others, Stephen Colbert, the NPR Code Switch podcast, Hegel, and the Supreme Court!