On increasing individual costs in an era of decreasing social costs

This is a response to an article by my friend Noah Baron. His middle name is Butch. It's the most ostentatious yet plausible name ever. The link can be found here. Essentially, he worries over the state of free academic discourse. His primary nettle comes from the possibility of "cascades" of opinion, a case in which everyone agrees with everyone else because someone they trust told them to agree.

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Noah, as an addendum to your article, I propose some examination of the benefits column of the general term dissent. I'll try and keep pretty words about how the world is fundamentally now thanks to the Internet to myself, but to say less than it has radically changed the information landscape would be deception of the highest order. So let us consider dissent for a moment. For this little discussion, I want to split people into two groups: the dissenters and nondissenters. I assume nondissenters have very few formed opinions regarding issues and that dissenters value a large following. Within dissenters, there are extremists and moderates.

I postulate dissent becomes less beneficial for a given dissenter due to a variant of crowding out leading to increased opportunity cost of information for nondissenters. This is doubly true when open dissent is discouraged.

Say we have a policy proposed by the government or members of government. Who dissents? Well, logic dictates that, ceteris peribus, those with greater disagreement with the policy are more likely to dissent for an equal or lesser level of difference. As such, someone who is extremely opposed is more likely to make the effort. Moderates, on the other hand, feel less pull to dissent due to less inherent disagreement. All well and good, but what about nondissenters?

Nondissenters face a sort of nightmare of demand smoothing which only a malevolent djinn could conjure up. Normally, variety is a social good. However, thousands upon thousands of opinions bombard the nondissenter via the Internet. As the number of stated, seemingly legitimate opinions increases, the opportunity cost of information for any given page view or absorbed opinion increases. Unfortunately then, all other things equal, the nondissenter will receive the greatest benefit from the opinions of more extreme dissenters than from those that are close to marginal on a given policy. This makes common sense, after all, as it's very easy to evaluate the binary choice of agree/disagree when faced with an opinion with few nuances. Thus, extremists offer a clear opposition for a low cost, while moderates, due to parsing time, offer an unclear opposition or assent at a higher cost.

Compounding this, each individual dissenter is less likely to be heard due to the numbers of other dissenters. As the probability of winning a nondissenter's favor decreases, the potential rewards for dissent must increase. Outside of the little model discussion, as the most accessible political dissent is confined to large, corporate bodies (cable news and book writers come to mind), the rewards of a large following seem even more unlikely for the individual dissenter given these barriers to entry. As such, we likely see falling benefits within the Internet age. Given these trends, we are probably more likely to have more cascades, rather than less, as many move to make dissent costlier (see the Obama administration's defense of "anti-blasphemy" laws in the UN). If we factor in the predispositions of nondissenters, it becomes unclear exactly what they will do. Given the search and opportunity costs are lowest for extremists, we may see even greater degrees of polarization. Although more extreme dissenters have greater benefits, increased social costs of dissent may put pressure on them to not voice their opinions. However, many dissenters outside of this hypothetical believe it is their normative duty to express their opinions, which likely increases as extremism increases.

Thus, we can see an era of falling benefits to moderates and unclear changes to extremists. Thus, social costs ("you're either with us or against us.") may actually affect moderates more strongly than extremists . There is some historical precedent for this in the G. W. Bush administration. In an age when benefits to individual dissenters are falling due to increased search costs and opportunity costs of information, decreasing the individual cost borne by the dissenter is the only way to balance out the increased costs. As Noah points out, decreasing the overall level of dissent in society probably has negative external costs in the future, which we would want to avoid. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, in this age when access to and transmission of information is easier than ever, we ought to exert more effort toward allowing the active participation of dissenters in discourse.