Intelligence as Rationalization Engine: Deep Rationality, Core Rationality, and the Biased Expert
A biased-expert paper explaining how high reasoning skill can defend a credence the evidence no longer supports.
Source Paper
This page is a simplified guide to the paper. The source document is linked below; the guide here keeps the main idea accessible and tied back to the site’s model.
Open on Academia.eduLow-Register Abstract
This paper asks why smart, trained, articulate people can be so hard to update. The answer is not that intelligence is bad. The answer is that intelligence improves evidence-processing power, and that power can serve either correction or defense.
The biased expert may have a small Objective Evidence to Perceived Evidence gap because they understand the material well. The problem appears when Assigned Credence (CA) is pulled away from Perceived Evidence (EP) by identity, status, incentives, fear, hope, loyalty, or prior commitment.
How It Fits Credencing
This paper gives the Biased Expert archetype its full research treatment. It explains why Deep Rationality (SD) can reduce one gap while leaving the EP-CA gap large.
It also adds safeguards against overdiagnosis. The paper requires traces such as asymmetric scrutiny, moving standards, directional update resistance, or refusal to state update conditions before treating disagreement as rationalization.
How to Read It
Read this when expertise seems to make a person more convincing but not more updateable. Ask whether the reasoning is tracking evidence, or whether the tools are being used to protect a settled confidence level.
Adjacent References
These are starting points rather than exhaustive citations. They connect this page to nearby work in probability, calibration, cognitive bias, and social epistemology.
- |Ziva Kunda, "The Case for Motivated Reasoning" (1990).
- |Charles S. Taber and Milton Lodge, "Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs" (2006).