I came out of academic circles in California in my young adulthood, and I see the snap judgements you refer to quite often in myself.

I think I was on a track where I valued learning and inference above everything, and that gave me a kind of a weird cognitive bias. Things I could rationalize that weren’t obvious got ++points in my head. The result being I overtrained towards using “scant” information, to use your nomenclature, and undertrained more abundant information sources that were more easily apprehended.

Kind of a masochistic information bias.

It did open my mind to some (very real) things that few people notice. Which is useful. But it also closed me off to some quite useful but more mundane realities. I probably share a lot with conspiracy theorists in that way.

It’s been hard reorienting myself out of that. In some ways I’ve overcompensated now and become more gullible.