Disagreement as Self-Deception About Meta-Rationality

Honest truth-seeking agents should not agree to disagree. This result is robust to many perturbations. Such agents are "meta-rational" when they act as if they realize this result. The ubiquity of disagreement, however, suggests that very few people, academics included, are very meta-rational. Instead, we seem self-deceived in thinking ourselves to more meta-rational than others. Since alerting us to this fact does not much change our behavior, we must not really want to know the truth.