One thing that confuses me is that when people detect contradiction/apparent hypocrisy between word and deed, many people assume that the hypocrisy is in the words, whereas imo both the prior and observed evidence should point towards the deed being much more likely to be wrong.

Eg if I see an alcoholic rally against drunk driving, or a slaveowner against slavery, I think it's more likely that they're wrong to keep drinking and driving or own slaves, than that their statements are suspect because of their actions. A preacher who lectures about the immorality of infidelity who goes on to cheat -- imo it's much more likely to me that the cheating is evidence that he doesn't live up to his ideals than that he secretly has different ideals.

More controversially, I also believe this about factory farming and eating meat, or AI risk and continuing to work in AI companies. Or for an example that goes against my cultural cluster, I expect a pro-life politician who secretly had an abortion to be much more likely to sincerely believe that abortions are immoral and that their own abortions are a lapse, than the abortion itself being evidence against their morals.

This just feels extremely obvious to me. I agree that an inconsistency between word and deed should make you doubt both the words and the deeds. But the question is which one you should doubt more? Imo, it should be the deeds, and it's not even close.

Like obviously it's (usually) much more individually costly to take actions that go against your selfish interests than to speak against your selfish interests, so we should expect people with weak ideals and strong selfish incentives to be more likely to speak their honest ideals than to act on them. Further, when we think about what's happening in speech vs behavior, it seems common to me that speech is more high-minded, less indexical, more likely to appeal to shared intuitions and principles and logical reasoning than first-order behavior.

I'm honestly pretty confused why people have the opposite intuition. Just seems pretty irrational/obviously wrong to me.