Something has gone structurally wrong with how we produce and consume opinions. We live in an age of unprecedented access to information, and yet the marketplace of ideas seems to be getting noisier, less accurate, and more polarized by the year. The reason is not simply that people are careless or uninformed. The reason is economic. We have built a system—an Opinion Economy—where confidence is more monetizable than accuracy, and where engagement rewards certainty over correctness. This is not a bug in the system. It is the system.
Across industries—finance, automotive journalism, real estate commentary, health and wellness, politics—a consistent pattern has emerged. The people who attract the largest audiences and command the most attention are not necessarily those with the deepest expertise. They are the ones who speak with the most conviction, who simplify the complex into the digestible, and who deliver their conclusions with an emotional charge that compels you to click, share, and subscribe. In doing so, they are responding rationally to the incentive structure around them. The trouble is that the incentive structure is profoundly misaligned with truth.
The Dunning-Kruger Economy
The Dunning-Kruger effect, in its simplest form, describes how people with limited knowledge in a domain tend to overestimate their competence, while genuine experts tend to underestimate theirs. In an ordinary social setting, this creates a mild conversational imbalance. In a monetized attention economy, it creates a catastrophic one.
Consider how content performs online. A video titled “Here’s Why You’re Investing All Wrong!” will reliably outperform one titled “Investment Strategy Depends on Multiple Context-Specific Variables.” The first is bold, emotionally provocative, and implies that the viewer possesses a fixable flaw. The second is accurate, responsible, and boring. The economics of content creation—advertising revenue, subscriber growth, algorithmic promotion—overwhelmingly reward the first approach. This creates a marketplace where people with shallow knowledge but strong convictions are structurally advantaged over careful experts. The less you know, the fewer caveats you feel compelled to offer, and the more shareable your take becomes.
Genuine expertise is messy. It is full of qualifications, edge cases, and uncomfortable admissions of uncertainty. But audiences do not reward that messiness. They reward clarity, decisiveness, and the feeling that someone has “figured it out.” The Dunning-Kruger effect, supercharged by monetization, means that the people most willing to offer that false clarity are precisely those least equipped to know how wrong they might be.
Wrongness Scales Better
Correct analysis is, almost by definition, boring. It is hedged. It is context-dependent. It says “it depends” more often than it says “here’s the answer.” Wrong but confident opinions, on the other hand, are simple, viral, and emotionally satisfying. They offer the audience the comfort of certainty in an uncertain world. And in an attention economy, that emotional satisfaction is the product being sold.
The financial commentary space makes this painfully visible. On any given day, you can find ten different self-described experts offering ten fundamentally different opinions about the same economic development—a jobs report, an interest rate decision, a quarterly earnings surprise. Each of them will present data points, charts, and historical precedents to support their position. And each of them is engaged in a subtle but important act of selection: choosing the data that supports their narrative while ignoring or minimizing data that complicates it. They are not necessarily lying. They are doing something more insidious—curating reality to fit a pre-existing conclusion. The audience, lacking the expertise to evaluate which data points matter and which are cherry-picked, is left to choose not the most accurate analyst, but the most compelling performer.
This is the core mechanism by which wrongness scales. A confident, emotionally resonant prediction about a stock market crash will circulate far more widely than a careful, probabilistic assessment that acknowledges multiple possible outcomes. When the crash does not materialize, the confident predictor faces no consequences. When it does, they are celebrated as a visionary. The asymmetry is staggering. The economics of being wrong, in other words, are quite good—as long as you are wrong with conviction.
The Selective Lens: Cars, Houses, and the Art of Framing
The Opinion Economy is perhaps most visible in consumer-facing content, where reviewers and commentators have enormous influence over purchasing decisions. The automotive review space offers a particularly instructive case study.
Car review channels on YouTube have, over the past decade, evolved from straightforward evaluations into elaborate exercises in opinion performance. A reviewer must differentiate their channel, build a recognizable perspective, and generate engagement. The easiest way to do this is not to conduct rigorous, standardized assessments of vehicles, but to develop a particular “angle”—a persona defined by strong, often arbitrary preferences that become the lens through which every car is judged.
Watch carefully and you will notice how selectively these reviews are constructed. A reviewer might declare that the rear-seat legroom of a sedan is “inadequate”—but only after adjusting the driver’s seat to their own preferred position, which may be pushed so far back that it distorts the entire spatial analysis of the cabin. Another might fixate on a headlight design they find unappealing, spending minutes of a review on what is fundamentally a cosmetic preference rather than a functional evaluation. “The materials don’t feel premium enough,” they might say, running their fingers along a dashboard panel—an assertion that is impossible to verify, impossible to quantify, and entirely a function of that individual’s subjective threshold. None of this is analysis. It is theater dressed as expertise, and the audience is invited to mistake one for the other.
The key insight is that these reviewers are not being evaluated on accuracy. Nobody returns six months later to check whether the reviewer’s prediction about a vehicle’s reliability held up, or whether their complaint about rear-seat space reflected a genuine design flaw or a personal seating preference. The engagement—the views, comments, and subscriptions—has already been captured. The opinion has already been monetized. Whether it was useful, correct, or fair is beside the point.
Real Estate and the Emotional Data Point
The real estate commentary space operates on the same fundamental principle, but with higher emotional stakes. People’s homes represent their largest financial investment, their sense of security, and their vision of the future. This makes real estate content extraordinarily fertile ground for the Opinion Economy, because the emotional charge is built into the subject matter.
Observe how a typical real estate “expert” on YouTube constructs a video. A news story breaks—perhaps a new housing report, a shift in mortgage rates, or a policy announcement. The expert does not present a comprehensive, balanced analysis of what the development means. Instead, they scan the data for the points that support their established narrative—whether that narrative is “the market is about to crash” or “now is the best time to buy”—and build their commentary around those selected facts. Contradictory data is either ignored, mentioned briefly and then dismissed, or reframed to fit the thesis.
The reason this works is that the audience is not primarily seeking information. They are seeking emotional confirmation. Homeowners want to hear that their investment is safe. Aspiring buyers want to hear that prices will drop. Investors want to hear that the market is ripe with opportunity. The commentator who delivers the most emotionally satisfying version of any of these narratives will capture the most attention, regardless of whether their analysis is sound. A dramatic video titled “The Housing Market is About to COLLAPSE” will generate vastly more engagement than a measured discussion of supply constraints, regional variation, and demographic trends. The economics are clear: emotional volatility is the product, and data is merely the raw material from which that product is manufactured.
What makes this especially pernicious is that these commentators often analyze each other’s opinions as source material. One expert will respond to another’s take, selecting the most provocative elements and using them as a springboard for their own rebuttal. A self-referential ecosystem emerges in which opinions about opinions generate more engagement than original analysis ever could. The entire cycle is fueled not by a search for truth, but by a search for the next emotional reaction.
No Accountability, No Consequences
In most professions where expertise matters, there exists some form of accountability feedback loop. A surgeon whose patients die at elevated rates faces malpractice claims and professional review. An engineer whose bridges fail faces investigation and career consequences. A financial advisor who loses clients’ money faces lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny. These feedback loops, imperfect as they are, serve to align incentives with outcomes. They ensure that being wrong carries a cost.
The Opinion Economy has no such mechanism. A financial commentator who predicted a market crash that never came can simply pivot to a new thesis without acknowledging the previous failure. A real estate expert who told viewers to wait for a crash that didn’t materialize, causing them to miss years of appreciation, faces no professional sanction. A car reviewer who panned a vehicle that turned out to be one of the most reliable in its class is never held to account. The content has already been consumed. The revenue has already been earned. The audience has already moved on to the next take.
This absence of accountability creates a moral hazard at the heart of the Opinion Economy. When there is no cost to being wrong, there is no incentive to be careful. When there is no penalty for confident incorrectness, the rational strategy is to be as confident as possible, as frequently as possible, about as many things as possible. Volume and conviction, not accuracy and care, become the paths to success.
The Oversupply Problem
The democratization of content creation was supposed to be one of the great triumphs of the internet age. Anyone with knowledge to share could find an audience. The marketplace of ideas would become more open, more competitive, and ultimately more accurate as the best ideas rose to the top.
What actually happened was something quite different. When everyone can monetize opinions, the marketplace becomes flooded with noise. But the economic incentives that govern which opinions rise to prominence do not filter for accuracy—they filter for engagement. And engagement, as we have seen, favors the extreme, the simple, the confident, and the emotionally provocative. The result is not a marketplace that elevates the best ideas, but one that elevates the most stimulating ones, which are often among the worst.
The sheer volume of opinion content creates a secondary problem: it becomes increasingly difficult for audiences to distinguish genuine expertise from performance. When a hundred people are confidently commenting on the same topic, all of them citing data and presenting themselves as authorities, the average consumer has no reliable mechanism for determining who actually knows what they are talking about. The oversupply of opinion does not create a rich ecosystem of perspectives. It creates a noise floor so high that signal becomes nearly impossible to detect.
The Social Cost
The Opinion Economy is not merely an abstract structural problem. It carries real and measurable social costs. Misinformation, once seeded by a confident opinion-seller, propagates through networks at a speed that corrections can never match. A single viral video making a false claim about an investment, a health treatment, or a political policy can reach millions before anyone with actual expertise has time to respond. And even when corrections are issued, they rarely reach the same audience with the same force.
Polarization is another direct consequence. Because the economics favor extreme positions—nuance does not generate engagement—the Opinion Economy pushes public discourse toward the poles. Every issue becomes a binary, every debate becomes a confrontation, and the middle ground—where most of reality actually resides—is abandoned because it is economically unviable.
Perhaps most corrosively, the Opinion Economy erodes public trust in expertise itself. When self-appointed experts are proven wrong but face no consequences, when genuine experts are drowned out by louder and more entertaining voices, the very concept of expertise comes to seem hollow. Why trust the careful analyst when the confident pundit seems just as credible and is far more entertaining? This erosion of trust does not merely affect individual decisions. It weakens the epistemic foundations on which collective decision-making depends.
The Way Forward
The Opinion Economy is not a conspiracy. It is not the result of bad actors deliberately misleading the public, though such actors certainly exist. It is the emergent result of an incentive structure that rewards confidence over accuracy, engagement over correctness, and emotional impact over analytical rigor. The platforms that host this content, the algorithms that promote it, and the audiences that consume it are all responding to the same economic logic. Fixing it requires understanding that the problem is structural, not moral.
What would an alternative look like? It would involve accountability mechanisms—track records made visible, predictions scored against outcomes, and reputations tied to accuracy rather than reach. It would involve platform design that does not systematically amplify the most emotionally provocative content. It would involve media literacy education that teaches audiences not just how to evaluate facts, but how to evaluate the people presenting those facts. And it would involve a cultural shift in how we value expertise—recognizing that the person who says “I don’t know” or “it’s complicated” may be offering something far more valuable than the person who says “Here’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
Until then, we live in a world where the most profitable opinion is not the most accurate one, but the most confident one—and where the cost of that confidence is borne not by the people who sell it, but by the people who buy it.