Comment by ngriffiths

In practice I think people often don't see the full structure of their own belief graph. Parts of it are clear but for 99% of important issues, it's more fuzzy than portrayed in the figures here. I still think this is an illuminating way of looking at it!

Another major factor is that while the graph may be fuzzy, the people we trust are clear. Only those people are allowed to "fill in" the missing pieces, and I think it takes a lot of work to do that, so it totally makes sense.

If the takeaway is "don't expect conflicting facts to convince your audience" I agree with that, but the reason is they don't trust you, not the conflicting graphs, and the trust is not really a consequence of the graph structure.

(Also, I was writing about similar stuff recently here: https://blog.griffens.net/blog/no-one-reads-page-28/)