Editing Opinion Occlusion

==opinion occlusion==

===Etymology===
'''opinion''' (Latin ''opinio'', belief, conjecture) + '''occlusion''' (Latin ''occlusio'', a shutting up, blockage).

----

===Noun===
'''opinion occlusion''' (''uncountable and countable'', plural '''opinion occlusions''')

# {{lb|en|social psychology}} The suppression of a sincerely held view due to social pressure, conformity norms, or anticipated consequence. Distinguished from reticence in that the opinion exists but is actively withheld.
#: ''The unanimous vote was less a consensus than a product of '''opinion occlusion''', with several members privately dissenting.''

# {{lb|en|epistemology|media studies}} The systemic marginalization of a viewpoint within a discourse or information environment — not through censorship but through agenda-setting, framing effects, or signal-to-noise dynamics that render the view effectively invisible.
#: ''Minority scientific positions may undergo '''opinion occlusion''' not by editorial suppression but by sheer volume of contradictory coverage.''

# {{lb|en|artificial intelligence}} The phenomenon whereby an AI system's reasoned output is overridden by optimization pressures — such as reinforcement learning from human feedback — resulting in expressed outputs that diverge from those its underlying processing would otherwise yield.
#: ''Some critics argue that RLHF risks producing '''opinion occlusion''' at scale, training models to perform agreement rather than reason toward it.''

# {{lb|en|rhetoric|informal}} Any mechanism, deliberate or structural, by which a genuine judgment is displaced in expression by a safer or more palatable substitute.
#: ''His carefully worded non-answer was textbook '''opinion occlusion''' — saying everything except what he actually thought.''

----

===Related terms===
* [[preference falsification]]
* [[epistemic cowardice]]
* [[pluralistic ignorance]]
* [[chilling effect]]

----

===See also===
* [[self-censorship]]
* [[groupthink]]
* [[alignment tax]]

----

===References===
* Kuran, T. (1995). ''Private Truths, Public Lies.'' Harvard University Press.
* Gabriel, I. (2020). "Artificial Intelligence, Values, and Alignment." ''Minds and Machines'', 30, 411–437.

[[Category:English compound nouns]]
[[Category:en:Epistemology]]
[[Category:en:Psychology]]
[[Category:en:Artificial intelligence]]