Members of the hectoring classes and their supporters spend a great deal of effort seeking to justify themselves. In the process they conceal relevant information and offer mistaken analyses. Consider: Paternal policies fight cognitive bias, slash information costs, and privelege responsible subselves

To help us avoid these biases we have hired representatives, who create agencies (like the FDA and the SEC) with committees and subcommittees that debate the issue: they put on seminars and conferences and write working papers and white papers and cost/benefit analyses, and invite comments, etc, in short, consider the matter in depth, and then decide to ban certain drugs or activities, and not others. We voters ratify this every 2 years, except when we change our mind, as with alcohol, tobacco, or thalidomide.

Besides saving our lives, minds and fortunes, a side benefit is savings for us citizens in information costs, because we citizens don't have to read all the papers, and a good thing too, because we have to use our time to make profits, the froth from which is used to pay our representatives. (We also save on decision costs.)

All this we do because we know we have many selves within ourselves, including a short term self who wants to snort cocaine, and guzzle Dr. Quacko's Tonic because 'everyone's doing it' (the bandwagon bias), and try our luck with porkbellies, who has a bad case of the Bias Blind Spot (the meta-bias which makes us think we don't have to compensate for our cognitive biases) VS. a long-term self, who knows it has cognitive biases and knows it can't overcome them, not alone, it needs help.

They do not save information costs, they displace them and in the end increase them. We citizens do not have to read all the papers. Most of them are mindless neeping about trivia in any event, published only to keep researchers employed. The fraction that contain useful knowledge are soon communicated to the rest of society. Real knowledge diffuses rapidly, unless gatekeepers restrict the flows. This has been done in a variety of ways - such as speaking and writing in convoluted ways using private notations - but it is becoming harder to do now that communication technologies have improved and those who can translate the garbled language quickly do so.

There is no need for mediators. They are anachronisms. They increase the costs to citizens of acquiring information by adding a layer of distortion and misinformnation. Citizens have to decode the mediators as well as evaluating real information about issues.

Individuals will always make some bad decisions. The existence of hectoring classes does not change this. Good decisions are more likely when real information flows freely. The social mind makes errors, and the best way to reduce error is to avoid polluting the information stream. There's a stepwise refinement process. The social mind mutters to itself, noting both bad and good thoughts as they occur, and makes progress not by hewing to the straight and narrow so much as continuously correcting course when the going gets rough off the path. The key to best progress is good and plentiful information.