Monday morning, January 13th. You've spent years building expertise in your field. People come to you for advice. You're known for your position on something. Then you encounter new evidence. Your position might be wrong. The rational move: Update your beliefs. The actual move: Defend your position. Why? Because admitting you were wrong isn't just about changing your mind—it's about losing the credibility you spent years building. Here's the paradox: The better you are at building credibility, the worse you get at updating your beliefs. Credibility, when working as intended, makes you more epistemically rigid.

The Thesis

Credibility is a trap. Not in the obvious way—yes, we know people lie to gain credibility, fake expertise, or manipulate trust. That's not the interesting trap.

The real trap is this: Credibility makes it costly to change your mind. The more credible you are on a topic, the more social capital you lose when you admit you were wrong. This creates a perverse incentive structure where the people best positioned to recognize they're wrong are least incentivized to admit it.

The controversial claim: Most experts are trapped by their own credibility. They're not lying or faking—they genuinely can't afford to update their beliefs as freely as non-experts can. Their credibility depends on consistency. Changing positions looks like weakness, indecision, or incompetence. So they double down on beliefs they're no longer confident in, defend positions that new evidence contradicts, and become more certain publicly while becoming less certain privately.

The result: The credibility mechanism that's supposed to help us identify reliable sources of truth actually makes those sources less reliable over time. Experts become invested in their past positions. Credibility becomes a cage.

How the Trap Works

Step 1: Build credibility through consistency

You become known for something. A position, an expertise, a way of thinking. People trust you because you've been right before, or at least consistent in your reasoning.

This is valuable. Credibility is social capital. It gets you opportunities, influence, respect, income. You've earned it.

Step 2: Encounter contradictory evidence

New data emerges. Maybe you were wrong. Maybe your position needs updating. Maybe the world changed and your previously-correct belief is now incorrect.

Step 3: Calculate the cost of updating

If you were nobody, you'd just update. No big deal. You were wrong, now you know better, move on.

But you're not nobody. You're the person known for believing X. People trust you because you believe X. Your reputation is built on X.

Updating means:

  • Admitting you were wrong (credibility hit)
  • Losing people who followed you for X (audience hit)
  • Looking inconsistent (reliability hit)
  • Possibly being seen as flip-flopping (competence hit)
  • Giving ammunition to people who disagreed with you (status hit)

Step 4: Double down instead

The incentive structure is clear: Defending your position preserves credibility. Changing it destroys credibility. Even if you're privately uncertain, public certainty is rewarded.

So you double down. You find ways to explain away the new evidence. You reinterpret the data. You adjust your position just enough to accommodate the challenge without actually changing your core belief.

You don't do this cynically. You genuinely convince yourself. Motivated reasoning is most effective when you don't notice you're doing it.

Step 5: Become trapped

The more you defend the position, the more credibility you've staked on it. The higher the cost of changing your mind becomes. Each defense makes the next defense more necessary.

Eventually, you can't change your mind even if you want to. Too much is invested. Too many people trust you for this specific position. Your identity, your income, your influence—all tied to believing X.

You're trapped by your own credibility.

Evidence the Trap is Real

Academia:

Academics build careers on theoretical positions. Changing your mind means your past papers, your citations, your doctoral students' work—all potentially undermined.

Incentive: Defend your theory. Find new ways to make it work. Dismiss contradictory evidence as methodological error.

Result: Massive intellectual inertia. Theories persist long after evidence suggests they're wrong. Progress happens "one funeral at a time" because experts won't update, so you have to wait for them to retire or die.

Politics:

Politicians are punished ruthlessly for "flip-flopping." Doesn't matter if they changed their mind based on new evidence—it looks weak. Consistency, even when wrong, signals strength.

Incentive: Never admit you were wrong. Maintain consistent positions regardless of new information.

Result: Politicians become trapped by their own past statements. They defend outdated positions because updating would be political suicide.

Public intellectuals:

Writers, podcasters, thought leaders build audiences around specific worldviews. Their income depends on people who agree with them. Changing positions risks losing their audience.

Incentive: Stay consistent with the views that built your platform.

Result: Public intellectuals become brands. The brand must remain consistent. The person inside the brand becomes trapped by it.

Corporate leadership:

CEOs make big strategic bets. Admitting the bet was wrong means admitting failure, possibly losing the board's confidence, maybe losing the job.

Incentive: Make the strategy work, no matter what. Pivot looks like failure. Persistence looks like leadership.

Result: Companies double down on failing strategies because the CEO can't afford to admit the original direction was wrong. Sunk cost fallacy at organizational scale.

Why Credibility Traps are Worse Than Ignorance

Ignorant people update easily:

If you don't know anything, admitting you were wrong costs nothing. You had no credibility to lose. Updating is free.

Experts update slowly:

The more expertise you have, the more you've staked on specific positions. Updating gets expensive.

This means: The people who should be most trusted to find truth (experts) are least able to admit error. The people who should update fastest (those with most information) update slowest.

Counterintuitive result: Sometimes ignorant people reach truth faster than experts—not because they're smarter, but because they're not trapped by credibility.

The Social Cost of Intellectual Honesty

Admitting you were wrong signals:

To some people: Intellectual honesty, good epistemic practices, rational updating.

To most people: Inconsistency, weakness, unreliability.

The market rewards:

  • Certainty over accuracy
  • Consistency over updating
  • Confidence over calibration

You can be:

  • Right and credible (best case)
  • Wrong and credible (common)
  • Right and not credible (common for correct contrarians)
  • Wrong and not credible (where most people start)

The trap: Building credibility moves you from "not credible" to "credible." But once you're credible, staying credible requires consistency more than accuracy. So credibility gradually decouples from correctness.

The perverse outcome: The most credible people are often not the most accurate—they're the most consistent. Accuracy requires updating when you're wrong. Consistency requires defending when you're wrong. The market rewards consistency.

Personal Examples

The tech executive:

Bet big on blockchain. Spent three years building blockchain products, giving blockchain talks, hiring blockchain engineers. Now realizes blockchain solved very few real problems. Can't admit this publicly—it would invalidate three years of work, make him look foolish, lose face with investors.

Continues to publicly defend blockchain while privately pursuing other tech. Trapped.

The nutrition influencer:

Built a platform around keto. 100k followers trust her for keto advice. Generates income from keto coaching, keto products, keto content. Then encounters evidence that keto isn't ideal for her specific health situation. Maybe not ideal for most people.

Can't pivot—her entire business is keto-based. Continues to promote keto even as her private beliefs shift. Trapped.

The political commentator:

Known for strong positions on complex topics. Built an audience that trusts those positions. Encounters nuance, realizes some positions were oversimplified or wrong. Can't publicly acknowledge this—would lose the audience that trusts his certainty.

Maintains public certainty while feeling private doubt. Trapped.

The academic:

Spent a career developing and defending a theory. Trained students in that theory. Published dozens of papers using that framework. New data suggests the theory has major flaws. Admitting this would undermine decades of work.

Finds ways to explain the new data within the old framework. Dies defending a theory he privately doubts. Trapped.

The Difference Between Brand and Belief

Your beliefs are what you actually think is true.

Your brand is what other people think you think is true.

When you have no credibility: Your brand and beliefs are the same thing. Nobody cares what you think, so you can think whatever seems most true.

When you have credibility: Your brand and beliefs start diverging. Your brand is what made you credible. Your beliefs update based on new evidence. But updating your brand is expensive—it destroys the credibility you built.

The trap: You become incentivized to maintain your brand even when your beliefs change. You perform your old beliefs publicly while holding new beliefs privately.

This creates cognitive dissonance. The solution: Convince yourself your brand is still your belief. Self-deception as a credibility maintenance strategy.

Why This Matters More Now

The internet amplifies credibility traps:

Pre-internet, your credibility was local. You could change your mind in a new city, new job, new social group. Your past statements weren't permanently searchable.

Now, everything is permanent and searchable. Every position you've ever taken is locked in. Changing your mind means confronting your entire documented history.

Social media rewards consistency:

Algorithms reward engagement. Engagement comes from strong, clear positions. Nuance gets ignored. Uncertainty gets no reach. Changing your mind looks like weakness and gets ratioed.

Platform dynamics encourage traps:

If your income depends on your platform, and your platform depends on your position, you literally can't afford to change your mind. Your epistemology becomes tied to your business model.

Consequence: We're creating a generation of people who are professionally unable to update their beliefs.

How to Escape Credibility Traps

Build credibility around your method, not your positions:

Don't become "the person who believes X." Become "the person who thinks clearly about X."

Then changing your position demonstrates your method working, not your method failing.

Example:

  • Bad branding: "I'm the anti-sugar doctor"
  • Good branding: "I follow evidence about nutrition wherever it leads"

The first can't change positions on sugar. The second can update based on new evidence.

Practice public updating:

Make changing your mind normal. Document your reasoning process, including when and why you update. Build credibility around intellectual honesty, not position consistency.

This requires courage. You'll lose followers who wanted certainty. You'll gain followers who value truth-seeking.

Separate income from position:

If your income depends on believing X, you can't afford to stop believing X. Diversify your credibility portfolio. Build multiple income streams not tied to specific positions.

Build in "I could be wrong":

Explicitly acknowledge uncertainty in your public positions. This pre-commits you to updating later without losing face.

"Based on current evidence, I believe X, but I'm about 70% confident. Here's what would change my mind: [specific conditions]."

Now when those conditions emerge, updating is predicted, not flip-flopping.

Surround yourself with people who reward updating:

Find communities that value intellectual honesty over consistency. Cultivate relationships where "I was wrong" is respected, not punished.

This is rare. Most social groups punish updating. Find or build different ones.

Accept the credibility hit:

Sometimes you just have to take the hit. You were wrong. You need to update. Yes, it will cost credibility. Pay the cost.

The alternative is worse: Defending positions you don't believe in, becoming intellectually dishonest, spending years trapped by past versions of yourself.

When You Should Take the Hit

Ask yourself:

Private belief test: If nobody knew what you used to believe, what would you believe now?

Five-year test: Will you respect yourself in five years if you maintain this position despite your doubts?

New person test: If you were encountering this topic fresh, with no history, what would you conclude?

If your private belief doesn't match your public brand, you're trapped. The question is whether staying trapped costs more than escaping.

Usually, escaping costs less than you think. You'll lose some followers. You'll take a short-term credibility hit. But:

  • The followers who leave weren't following you for good reasons
  • The credibility you lose is credibility built on false pretenses
  • The freedom to think clearly is worth more than fake credibility

Takeaways

Core insight: Credibility and truth-seeking are often opposed. Credibility rewards consistency. Truth-seeking requires updating when you're wrong. The more credible you become, the harder it becomes to update, which makes you less reliable over time. The trap isn't that you lose credibility—it's that preserving credibility makes you epistemically worse.

What's actually true:

  1. Experts get trapped by credibility - The more expertise you have, the more costly it becomes to change your mind, making experts slower to update than novices
  2. Consistency is rewarded over accuracy - People trust consistency more than they trust updating, creating perverse incentives to maintain positions even when wrong
  3. Brand and belief diverge - Public figures maintain public positions that differ from private beliefs to preserve credibility
  4. The internet makes traps worse - Everything is permanent and searchable, making historical positions harder to escape
  5. Method beats position - Building credibility around thinking process rather than specific conclusions allows updating without credibility loss

What to do:

If you're building credibility:

  • Build it around your process, not your positions
  • Say "I could be wrong, here's what would change my mind" early and often
  • Practice public updating so it's normal, not exceptional
  • Diversify your platform so no single position is load-bearing
  • Accept that you'll attract smaller audiences but more honest ones

If you're currently trapped:

  • Run the private belief test: What would you believe if you had no history?
  • Calculate the cost of staying trapped versus the cost of updating
  • Remember: Credibility built on defending wrong positions isn't valuable
  • Most people respect "I was wrong" more than you think (the good ones, anyway)
  • It's better to take a short-term credibility hit than spend years defending positions you don't believe

If you're consuming content:

  • Distrust people who never update or admit error
  • Trust people who show their reasoning and acknowledge uncertainty
  • "I used to think X, now I think Y" is a green flag, not a red flag
  • Consistency over decades is a warning sign—either they're always right (unlikely) or they're trapped
  • Look for intellectual honesty over intellectual consistency

The uncomfortable reality:

Most people you trust for expertise are trapped. They've built credibility on positions they can't afford to abandon. The more credible they are, the more likely they're defending outdated beliefs. The experts you should trust most are the ones willing to destroy their credibility by changing their minds.

But those people don't look credible. They look inconsistent. They change positions. They admit error. They say "I don't know" and "I was wrong."

So we trust the trapped experts and ignore the honest updaters. And wonder why expert consensus is so often wrong, so slow to change, so resistant to new evidence.

The answer: Credibility traps. Experts get trapped by their own credibility. The mechanism meant to identify reliable truth-seekers becomes a mechanism that prevents truth-seeking.

What this means for you:

If you care about being right: Never let credibility become more valuable than truth. Build in escape hatches. Practice updating publicly. Accept that this makes you look less authoritative—that's the cost of actually being reliable.

If you care about influence: Recognize the trade-off. You can optimize for credibility or for accuracy. Usually not both. Credibility requires consistency. Accuracy requires updating. Choose which one matters more.

If you care about expertise: Be suspicious of your own certainty. The more credible you are, the more likely you're trapped. The positions you're most confident in are probably the ones you're most invested in defending. Ask: Am I confident because the evidence is strong, or because changing my mind would be costly?

The deepest trap: Thinking you're not trapped. Everyone with credibility is trapped. The question is whether you notice and fight it, or whether you convince yourself your trapped positions are your genuine beliefs.

Most people never notice. They defend their positions sincerely, never realizing the defense is motivated by credibility preservation, not by evidence.

The way out: Treat every firmly-held belief with suspicion. The stronger your public commitment to a position, the less you should trust your private confidence in it. Your certainty might be real. Or it might be credibility protection disguised as conviction.

Ask yourself: Would I believe this if I wasn't known for believing this?

If the answer is no, or even "I'm not sure," you're trapped.

And the only escape is to take the hit.

Today's Sketch

January 13, 2026