I can’t name the phenomenon, but it boils down to the recipient not “trusting” the messenger. And I don’t mean trust in the dictionary definition sense, I more mean the weight that the recipient ascribes to the messenger.

For some that means they will default “trust” messages from authority figures, or anyone boasting credentials. For others it is the polar opposite, they’ll default distrust messages from authority figures or credentialists. And don’t be fooled into thinking this is some big grey area where people don’t know how to categorise trusted vs untrusted messengers, it’s instinctive on an individual level, almost automatic, and it takes a lot of introspection to understand one’s own biases and why one is rejecting certain messengers whilst accepting others.

We saw this a few months ago with the Nostrich who got upset at users being pseudonymous - his mental model ascribes very little trust to messages from “unknown” entities, he would lend messages more weight if the account appeared to be a “real person” identifying themselves by name and using a pfp. He couldn’t grok from the pseudonymous users that we don’t place weight on that, that we value the substance of the message far more than the messenger and are willing to sift through shit to find it, even if it’s potentially less efficient.

I don’t know Mike but I have formed a profile of him in my mind in a year on this platform. He’s more trusting of authority figures than you or I (not hard when comparing to “ancap”).

He’s also not a Bitcoiner so he won’t grok the “connection” that Bitcoiners have on this message/messenger dichotomy - Bitcoiners have a shared experience of knowing how much effort it took to study and learn things we hold to be true, how we had to unlearn things, how we were humbled by certain learnings etc. So when other Bitcoiners speak on something with authority we tend to lend them more weight because we feel a shared sense in the proof of work which is ultimately where the “cult” rhetoric comes from.

For Mike I suspect if he is ever to come around on this topic he’ll either first have to become a Bitcoiner, or he’ll have to find a different message/messenger path from the type of figures he instinctively trusts (even if he hasn’t thought about why he trusts them).

Something more like this quote from the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Marcia Angell