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bqe | 5 years ago

It's important to know the limits of your knowledge and reasoning capabilities and defer to relevant experts, which is known as epistemic learned helplessness[1]. This is also much faster, as a lot of bullshit sounds like truth if you're unfamiliar with the field.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180416171148/http://squid314.l...

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roenxi|5 years ago

Better to just account for expert opinions rather than defer to them; experts typically don't have a magical ability to see through uncertainty. And it is possible to find experts who support a very wide range of opinions. This can be compounded - eg, government officials have fair incentive not to report bad news unless they are completely certain that things have gone wrong. So it would be a mistake to do your recession planning while deferring to the experts at the US Fed.

Another topical example is the WHO in this COVID-19 crisis. The WHO was pretty consistently reporting on what had certainly gone wrong rather than what had likely gone wrong so it was preempted by a bunch of countries closing their borders against the WHO's advice.