There's No Such Thing as Bias-Free Experience

I just read this tweet: "so leftie friend married a foreigner & it has been rather fascinating watching them become increasingly libertarian due to their travails with customs & immigration!" - Bella Rudd @BellaRudd https://twitter.com/BellaRudd1/status/1522942242293379072

An aphorism comes to mind: A strongly-held opinion rarely survives confrontation with the real world.

Along similar lines is the essay, “The only moral abortion is my abortion”.

The core idea here is that it's quite easy to have strong views on something when you have much less than all the evidence. Because you haven't actually tried to put any of it into practice, you don't see or understand the nuance, complexity, and practicalities of that particular area. But as soon as you're plunged into it, trying to get stuff done, your opinion may quite significantly change.

This meshes with my long-held view that there is an inherent tradeoff between expertise and incentive – specifically, that the only people who are well-versed in a subject area are those who have worked in it, and therefore have been (or are still) subject to its incentives.

For example, the revolving door between lobbyist and legislature, or legislature and industry via lobbying. Or the need for (and distaste for) hiring oil industry experts into energy regulatory agencies. They are the most knowledgeable people, but also the most likely to have conflicted incentives or apparently biased views. In fact they may indeed have biased views, but to a great extent those biases are genuine and informed by their experience.

It's impossible to separate the two – there is no such thing as bias-free experience, since experience necessarily biases us.