Anatomy of a Sinclair situation

Part 4 of a series on the Peter Thiel question.

Upton Sinclair said that it’s hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon not understanding it. In a previous post, I looked at a number of example scenarios in which a person might be best off aborting or corrupting the pursuit of truth in order to protect some held belief that has practical benefits.

I’m calling these ‘Sinclair situations’ after the man. In this post, I’ll look at the anatomy of a Sinclair situation.

Roughly, a Sinclair situation is something that meets these three criteria:

• A person believes some proposition, p, to be true
• p is false
• Believing p has significant instrumental benefits for person such that the person is better off believing p than believing the truth

This needs further specification.

In order to qualify as a Sinclair situation, must the agent know that he’s best off believing p, regardless of whether p is true? Or could he just think that p is really true, and so stumble into the benefits? I think the concept of a Sinclair situation will be most useful if we don’t require the agent to know that believing p is better for him. Many of the most important examples of Sinclair situations we’ll be looking at are of this sort.

There are also questions around what it means for p to be true or false, what it means for the agent to believe p, and what exactly qualifies as a proposition. These questions and more will be addressed in future episodes.