> politics: that rare area where there are no real experts, and it's every man for himself
There are experts, but things are so politicized that everyone dislikes them (the acts don't agree with anyone's partisan position) and reads what is appealing. I think that was the OP's point, but it's a dangerous notion to think we all know politics roughly equally well.
Political science can be highly informative and predictive, as can research in adjacent fields such as international relations. It transforms my understanding of what others are saying (with partisans being reliably absurd).
Specifically in terms of being predictive you might be interested in reading Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? by Philip E. Tetlock if you are not familiar with it already. He tried to empirically test experts political judgement and the main conclusion was pretty much everybody was bad. He now runs the good judgement project which trying to measure good forecasting skills to figure out who really is good at it. It was very eye opening to me at the time.
I studied politics and history. In my experience, there is also a bias towards writing exceptionally partisan things. I used to write things that were hedging, and which were summaries of the argument. Invariably, these papers scored significantly lower than papers which took a position (whether that was accurate or not).
Of course, university isn't reality. But my point is that people do not find realistic opinions that interesting. Saying "I don't know" or "both sides have merit" is sometimes accurate but never interesting. Society selects for this.
I also worked in finance which exposes you to a reasonably fast feedback loop between opinion and reality. I met people who had multi-decade records of crushing it, and they usually had very anodyne takes. You come in expecting they have access to some higher form of truth...in reality, they are just better at seeing what is already there.
You see this, particularly, when a famed investor says the market is over-valued. Inevitably, they will get lambasted publicly. But you realise that their view is usually one that works long-term, that is quantifiable, that uses reason...everyone else just wants emotion.
The difference isn't knowledge. You can have huge knowledge, you can be rewarded heavily for being right, you can be a media "expert"...but if you aren't interested in reality, it doesn't matter.
I don't think it is about avoiding having strong views either but it has to be strong views, weakly held. With time I think a minority of the population realises that some people will have the same opinion regardless of what facts are presented to them. What is frustrating is that society reproduces so much of this nonsense.
Maybe a better way to put it is politics is an arena where every person can have an opinion that's contrary to what is common, and still have good reasons (even after we look closely) for it being so. We can both believe that the world works in a certain way but have differing views on what to do, simply from having different values.
For example, we can both think that higher taxes harm business, or that higher taxes can be used to equalize opportunities, but have differing views on what is good to do.
The point is not that we all know politics equally well.
Thr point is that, in politics, a credentialed expert doesn't really have any advantage in predictive power over a reasonably well-informed layman.
Statistician and market researcher Jim Manzi made this point roughly ten years ago. It's not a knock against the social sciences either. The point is that you can't generalize in the social sciences the way you can with harder sciences because the causal factors are so complex.
Political “science” can help you understand politics, but it can’t endow you with an expert opinion on which policies to implement. Prioritising or selecting policy agendas is largely an exercise in choosing what to value, and there is no scientifically correct perspective on human values.
Also, if you want to implement a democratic process, then the goals of your policies should be to align with what people want, even if you think people want stupid things. All other forms of government are authoritarian, including technocracies run by “experts”.
There are also different 'politics' careers or sets of knowledge.
I own a digital agency that does digital marketing/fundraising for Democrats. so my view is there is a ton of knowledge and experiences that are unique to how political campaigns are run.
For sure a lot of knowledge is transferable like if you know how to buy FB ads. (sidenote imho political consultants are way too insular and lag behind what the rest of the digital marketing world does)
But I believe there is unique expertise that one builds up learning through years of working on campaigns. It's a weird blend of science, marketing, and some unquantifiable 'experience.'
Which is BS sometimes for sure.
But an example of experiential expertise is that say you want to make decisions based on data. So you do polling and surveys. But one can write a poll question in a bunch of ways to get pretty different response. Framing and background knowledge is important. though lol now that I wrote this out polling might not be the best example, it's a big can of worms. Pollsters after each election say they learned what was wrong with their weighting/models ex post facto lol.
> Their only hopes of being taken seriously as an Expert - a position our culture treats as the height of dignity - is to create a complete alternate system of knowledge, ungrounded in any previous system, where they can end up as an expert on the Lizard Papacy.
This is true, but I'm not sure that viewed from the larger perspective this is an unalloyed good. Sure we can do without crackpots. But do we really want the only voices that matter to be those belonging to persons with "PhD" attached to their names?
I am not sure if the article is presenting it as an unalloyed good, but I certainly agree with you.
We need to be thoughtful about how we design "epistemic communities." The current approach centered around normal institutions/academia I think is flawed (although I do think professional scientists are very important).
There is a not a "minor league" version of competing for Nobel in Physics or Chemistry but it also doesn't have to exist as it is not what those people are after. From my POV and experience, what broke down are communities and role of discussion and gossip in those same communities. The popular "Have you heard X about Y" use to apply to a local teacher, major, bar owner ect. and more connection people would find between the X and prominent the figure would be in the community, the more engaged the conversation would have been.
A conversation would go like this Today it's about pop stars, politicians, scientist aka people you (them) will never meet in RL.
I imagine this would be a typical example of conversations that are missing:
Person A: "Have you heard about our major, he is sleeping with the shop owners daughter?"
Person B: "Oh no, really? Doesn't she have a child with the son of the barber?"
Person A: "You mean the barber on the main square?"
Person B: "Yes, that one he use to have more shops but they failed, because barber no.2 screwed him over"
Person A: " That is not what I heard... the story I heard is that barber no1. didn't do his fair share"
Person B: " Come on... that can't justify that..." ECT ECT ECT
This rather long article saying nothing (weird, because I love his other stuff) reinforces my continually growing belief that "general knowledge" is not a particularly clear or useful construct, especially beyond a certain threshhold. (This is also why A.I. is wildly and absurdly overblown.)
There are groups and pockets of people who believe sets of things; some are more robust than others probably because they get tested via skin-in-the-game means.
It amuses me to no end to read all these nuanced (dis)agreements, but then miss the obvious connection: HN is exactly one of those proposed intellectual leagues!
A place in which curious people explore and debate their common interests, where you don't have to be an intellectual superstar to participate (although those occasionally show up).
Expertise is not such a cut-and-dry matter. Pretense is more rampant than one would like to admit. And what good does it do you that someone else knows something? It only becomes YOUR knowledge when YOU know it.
In any case, seeking knowledge isn't a race. It's about YOU personally trying to grow in wisdom. You don't read Aristotle because you'll "beat" someone at philosophy. Millions of people have read him before you were even born. You read him so that YOU become a better human person. Our lives are a journey of coming to know the truth, or at least they ought to be, and that means a steady resolution of our initial confusion. This requires the cultivation of virtue because vice corrupts motives and moves them away from the steadfast pursuit of truth toward lesser things in an improper way.
Life isn't about measuring dicks. It's about happiness which is about becoming more fully what you are as an individual human being. Is the life of a simple carpenter who does the best he can worthless because he isn't Michelangelo?
So get rid of your pride and the need to be special and you will be set free from countless miseries. Compared to infinity, all dicks are small and only the prideful man would fall into despair over that realization. He wants fame or adulation from everyone. Focus on your own life and the world around you. Be the salt of the earth to those around you and profit from their good. Stop chasing illusions.
> ... what's the intellectual equivalent of the minor leagues?
It's called bar trivia and it's awesome! I'm not a super smart dude, but I love going to a bar trivia and seeing what I get right (despite never having watched the show, I guessed that the motor home in The Walking Dead was a Winnebago) and what I frustratingly get wrong (despite being a huge fan of pop-punk music, I couldn't remember the title to Green Day's hit song Basket Case).
> Their only hopes of being taken seriously as an Expert - a position our culture treats as the height of dignity - is to create a complete alternate system of knowledge, ungrounded in any previous system, where they can end up as an expert on the Lizard Papacy.
I couldn't help but notice the resemblance with how postmodernism and critical theory and their derivatives have infiltrated Academia.
> It's the feeling that you have something to contribute to the great project of figuring out the secret structure of the world, and that other people in a shared community of knowledge-seeking will appreciate you for it.
QAnon exists, in part, because of the metaverse. The metaverse can be viewed as some augmented reality version of of the real world. Conversations and ideas that foment and thrive in the metaverse eventually make their way back to reality. You can (mostly) thank Facebook for that...
I disagree with several of the premises of the article.
There are lots of interesting things to learn that are well within the intellectual horsepower of average people, esp if you give people a short primer or refresher on experiment design. For example, there is a guy “Project Farm” on YouTube that does practical experiments to see which hand tool is better. Are his experiments rigorous enough for a scientific journal? Probably not, but he’s transparent about the design and conduct of his experiments and develops useful information in an entertaining way.
Put another way, just as there are precious few people to lead the NBA in scoring or discover the Higgs boson, doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for the rest of us to do our own corresponding modest things.
For every person who patents a process for the economical industrial scale production of graphene there are scores of relatively normal people who invent practical stuff like wrenches and paper clips.
If I have convinced you that this premise is wrong, then the argument against QAnon falls apart, as the argument posits that the only way for normies to get their intellectual itch scratched is to invent conspiracies.
Personally I think the argument is wrong for other reasons: I’ve met some QAnon people and there are way more consumers than producers; it appears that QAnon is not only or even primarily about “solving” the conspiracy.
My opinion is that QAnon is about as serious as anything else that emerged from 4Chan and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was an elaborate hoax with some giggly drunk people writing posts now and then.
The people I know who subscribe to QAnon theories are people who feel powerless but desperately want there to exist a “5th column” who will take down the tyrannical forces of evil that they perceive but don’t know how to effectively fight. They really do believe that the generals are about to March in and arrest Biden for (insert latest crazy legal theory here) and re-install Trump. It’s a form of political fantasy.
QAnon exists for the same reason Alex Jones exists. Sensation sells. You can still be an (entirely rational) "prepper" if you want to be. Yet, it's routinely associated with right-wing extremism and delegitimized as a movement. By the same token, you can probably try to be an independent, investigative journalist even if you are bound to not survive scrutiny, especially if you let foundational research practices and sourcing slip.
I often here the analogy to sports when it comes to expertise. And if it often applies, but not always.
Epistemology is simply the study of "the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues." [1]
We all do epistemology, all the time, whether we choose to think about it or not. In sports, we have minor leagues, where the stakes are lower. As the political climate (and the unfortunate affect of things like QAnon) demonstrates, the stakes aren't always lower just because epistemology is done poorly.
Something similar can be said of rhetoric. I applaud this article for not falling a trap we have also seen too often recently, the Appeal to Authority [2]. The author judges someone else's argument solely on the merits, rather than that person's background. To steal the original authors metaphor: Babe Ruth still had to go up to the plate and take a swing. Babe Ruth was an expert baseball player because he hit a lot of home runs. It would bizarre if the opposite were true - that is, if Babe Ruth was given a lot of home runs because he was an expert. And yet, we have experts that try to dismiss plausible (perhaps likely, perhaps unlikely, but nevertheless plausible) scenarios without any explanation as to why they choose to do that. [3][4] And it is incumbent of all of us in a free society to be able to read something presented to us and realize, though we may not be experts, even if the conclusion is right, the argument along the way isn't.
> My point is we're all engaged in this kind of desperate project of trying to feel like we're having new important insights, in a world full of people who are much smarter than we are... Partly this is all for the greater good... I would argue "intellectual exercise" is a better term.
I've come to the conclusion that even if it's not read by many people, public professions are still valuable. As an American who is generally more "conservative" but also finds Trump abhorrent, I wish I had written more random internet posts in the summer of 2015 about how, even from a traditional conservative perspective, Trump is terrible, for the World, for the US, and for Conservatism. Perhaps it would have changed a few people's minds. Maybe it wouldn't have changed anyone's minds, but planted a seed of doubt in people's blind faith for that man. I'm a complete amateur when it comes to all the relevant subjects. Yet, it still seems like it would have been a good thing to do.
Perhaps the alternative is that if you know anything abrasive will be ignored or derailed by others then you’ll automatically not share knowledge and then you don’t learn.
If people who are intelligent can’t handle ideas that aren’t “palatable” to them, what’s the fucking purpose of your academy? lol.
It’s like asking atheists to care about your church’s rules. You’re just stupid for not understanding that they aren’t participating with you any longer.
[+] [-] wolverine876|4 years ago|reply
There are experts, but things are so politicized that everyone dislikes them (the acts don't agree with anyone's partisan position) and reads what is appealing. I think that was the OP's point, but it's a dangerous notion to think we all know politics roughly equally well.
Political science can be highly informative and predictive, as can research in adjacent fields such as international relations. It transforms my understanding of what others are saying (with partisans being reliably absurd).
[+] [-] mcshicks|4 years ago|reply
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691178288/ex...
[+] [-] hogFeast|4 years ago|reply
Of course, university isn't reality. But my point is that people do not find realistic opinions that interesting. Saying "I don't know" or "both sides have merit" is sometimes accurate but never interesting. Society selects for this.
I also worked in finance which exposes you to a reasonably fast feedback loop between opinion and reality. I met people who had multi-decade records of crushing it, and they usually had very anodyne takes. You come in expecting they have access to some higher form of truth...in reality, they are just better at seeing what is already there.
You see this, particularly, when a famed investor says the market is over-valued. Inevitably, they will get lambasted publicly. But you realise that their view is usually one that works long-term, that is quantifiable, that uses reason...everyone else just wants emotion.
The difference isn't knowledge. You can have huge knowledge, you can be rewarded heavily for being right, you can be a media "expert"...but if you aren't interested in reality, it doesn't matter.
I don't think it is about avoiding having strong views either but it has to be strong views, weakly held. With time I think a minority of the population realises that some people will have the same opinion regardless of what facts are presented to them. What is frustrating is that society reproduces so much of this nonsense.
[+] [-] lordnacho|4 years ago|reply
For example, we can both think that higher taxes harm business, or that higher taxes can be used to equalize opportunities, but have differing views on what is good to do.
[+] [-] lliamander|4 years ago|reply
Thr point is that, in politics, a credentialed expert doesn't really have any advantage in predictive power over a reasonably well-informed layman.
Statistician and market researcher Jim Manzi made this point roughly ten years ago. It's not a knock against the social sciences either. The point is that you can't generalize in the social sciences the way you can with harder sciences because the causal factors are so complex.
[+] [-] AmericanChopper|4 years ago|reply
Also, if you want to implement a democratic process, then the goals of your policies should be to align with what people want, even if you think people want stupid things. All other forms of government are authoritarian, including technocracies run by “experts”.
[+] [-] dillondoyle|4 years ago|reply
I own a digital agency that does digital marketing/fundraising for Democrats. so my view is there is a ton of knowledge and experiences that are unique to how political campaigns are run.
For sure a lot of knowledge is transferable like if you know how to buy FB ads. (sidenote imho political consultants are way too insular and lag behind what the rest of the digital marketing world does)
But I believe there is unique expertise that one builds up learning through years of working on campaigns. It's a weird blend of science, marketing, and some unquantifiable 'experience.'
Which is BS sometimes for sure.
But an example of experiential expertise is that say you want to make decisions based on data. So you do polling and surveys. But one can write a poll question in a bunch of ways to get pretty different response. Framing and background knowledge is important. though lol now that I wrote this out polling might not be the best example, it's a big can of worms. Pollsters after each election say they learned what was wrong with their weighting/models ex post facto lol.
[+] [-] strulovich|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmdulaney|4 years ago|reply
This is true, but I'm not sure that viewed from the larger perspective this is an unalloyed good. Sure we can do without crackpots. But do we really want the only voices that matter to be those belonging to persons with "PhD" attached to their names?
[+] [-] whimsicalism|4 years ago|reply
We need to be thoughtful about how we design "epistemic communities." The current approach centered around normal institutions/academia I think is flawed (although I do think professional scientists are very important).
You can look at some philosophers of science who have thinking very much along these lines, ie. https://www.liamkofibright.com/research.html
[+] [-] Kosirich|4 years ago|reply
There is a not a "minor league" version of competing for Nobel in Physics or Chemistry but it also doesn't have to exist as it is not what those people are after. From my POV and experience, what broke down are communities and role of discussion and gossip in those same communities. The popular "Have you heard X about Y" use to apply to a local teacher, major, bar owner ect. and more connection people would find between the X and prominent the figure would be in the community, the more engaged the conversation would have been. A conversation would go like this Today it's about pop stars, politicians, scientist aka people you (them) will never meet in RL.
I imagine this would be a typical example of conversations that are missing:
Person A: "Have you heard about our major, he is sleeping with the shop owners daughter?" Person B: "Oh no, really? Doesn't she have a child with the son of the barber?" Person A: "You mean the barber on the main square?" Person B: "Yes, that one he use to have more shops but they failed, because barber no.2 screwed him over" Person A: " That is not what I heard... the story I heard is that barber no1. didn't do his fair share" Person B: " Come on... that can't justify that..." ECT ECT ECT
[+] [-] jrm4|4 years ago|reply
There are groups and pockets of people who believe sets of things; some are more robust than others probably because they get tested via skin-in-the-game means.
[+] [-] whimsicalism|4 years ago|reply
Mind an example? I'm curious, because I so far have not been blown away by the writing of the rationalist-adjacent subcommunity.
[+] [-] 2mol|4 years ago|reply
A place in which curious people explore and debate their common interests, where you don't have to be an intellectual superstar to participate (although those occasionally show up).
[+] [-] bobthechef|4 years ago|reply
In any case, seeking knowledge isn't a race. It's about YOU personally trying to grow in wisdom. You don't read Aristotle because you'll "beat" someone at philosophy. Millions of people have read him before you were even born. You read him so that YOU become a better human person. Our lives are a journey of coming to know the truth, or at least they ought to be, and that means a steady resolution of our initial confusion. This requires the cultivation of virtue because vice corrupts motives and moves them away from the steadfast pursuit of truth toward lesser things in an improper way.
Life isn't about measuring dicks. It's about happiness which is about becoming more fully what you are as an individual human being. Is the life of a simple carpenter who does the best he can worthless because he isn't Michelangelo?
So get rid of your pride and the need to be special and you will be set free from countless miseries. Compared to infinity, all dicks are small and only the prideful man would fall into despair over that realization. He wants fame or adulation from everyone. Focus on your own life and the world around you. Be the salt of the earth to those around you and profit from their good. Stop chasing illusions.
[+] [-] sdhfjg|4 years ago|reply
Wisdom for the ages.
[+] [-] distortedsignal|4 years ago|reply
It's called bar trivia and it's awesome! I'm not a super smart dude, but I love going to a bar trivia and seeing what I get right (despite never having watched the show, I guessed that the motor home in The Walking Dead was a Winnebago) and what I frustratingly get wrong (despite being a huge fan of pop-punk music, I couldn't remember the title to Green Day's hit song Basket Case).
[+] [-] tomjakubowski|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeeMassive|4 years ago|reply
I couldn't help but notice the resemblance with how postmodernism and critical theory and their derivatives have infiltrated Academia.
[+] [-] dash2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] efitz|4 years ago|reply
Cracked me up. Visions of minor league math competitions, etc.
[+] [-] whimsicalism|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonu|4 years ago|reply
QAnon exists, in part, because of the metaverse. The metaverse can be viewed as some augmented reality version of of the real world. Conversations and ideas that foment and thrive in the metaverse eventually make their way back to reality. You can (mostly) thank Facebook for that...
[+] [-] mistermann|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] efitz|4 years ago|reply
There are lots of interesting things to learn that are well within the intellectual horsepower of average people, esp if you give people a short primer or refresher on experiment design. For example, there is a guy “Project Farm” on YouTube that does practical experiments to see which hand tool is better. Are his experiments rigorous enough for a scientific journal? Probably not, but he’s transparent about the design and conduct of his experiments and develops useful information in an entertaining way.
Put another way, just as there are precious few people to lead the NBA in scoring or discover the Higgs boson, doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for the rest of us to do our own corresponding modest things.
For every person who patents a process for the economical industrial scale production of graphene there are scores of relatively normal people who invent practical stuff like wrenches and paper clips.
If I have convinced you that this premise is wrong, then the argument against QAnon falls apart, as the argument posits that the only way for normies to get their intellectual itch scratched is to invent conspiracies.
Personally I think the argument is wrong for other reasons: I’ve met some QAnon people and there are way more consumers than producers; it appears that QAnon is not only or even primarily about “solving” the conspiracy.
My opinion is that QAnon is about as serious as anything else that emerged from 4Chan and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was an elaborate hoax with some giggly drunk people writing posts now and then.
The people I know who subscribe to QAnon theories are people who feel powerless but desperately want there to exist a “5th column” who will take down the tyrannical forces of evil that they perceive but don’t know how to effectively fight. They really do believe that the generals are about to March in and arrest Biden for (insert latest crazy legal theory here) and re-install Trump. It’s a form of political fantasy.
[+] [-] Lochleg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jkingsbery|4 years ago|reply
Epistemology is simply the study of "the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues." [1] We all do epistemology, all the time, whether we choose to think about it or not. In sports, we have minor leagues, where the stakes are lower. As the political climate (and the unfortunate affect of things like QAnon) demonstrates, the stakes aren't always lower just because epistemology is done poorly.
Something similar can be said of rhetoric. I applaud this article for not falling a trap we have also seen too often recently, the Appeal to Authority [2]. The author judges someone else's argument solely on the merits, rather than that person's background. To steal the original authors metaphor: Babe Ruth still had to go up to the plate and take a swing. Babe Ruth was an expert baseball player because he hit a lot of home runs. It would bizarre if the opposite were true - that is, if Babe Ruth was given a lot of home runs because he was an expert. And yet, we have experts that try to dismiss plausible (perhaps likely, perhaps unlikely, but nevertheless plausible) scenarios without any explanation as to why they choose to do that. [3][4] And it is incumbent of all of us in a free society to be able to read something presented to us and realize, though we may not be experts, even if the conclusion is right, the argument along the way isn't.
> My point is we're all engaged in this kind of desperate project of trying to feel like we're having new important insights, in a world full of people who are much smarter than we are... Partly this is all for the greater good... I would argue "intellectual exercise" is a better term.
I've come to the conclusion that even if it's not read by many people, public professions are still valuable. As an American who is generally more "conservative" but also finds Trump abhorrent, I wish I had written more random internet posts in the summer of 2015 about how, even from a traditional conservative perspective, Trump is terrible, for the World, for the US, and for Conservatism. Perhaps it would have changed a few people's minds. Maybe it wouldn't have changed anyone's minds, but planted a seed of doubt in people's blind faith for that man. I'm a complete amateur when it comes to all the relevant subjects. Yet, it still seems like it would have been a good thing to do.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority 3. https://apnews.com/article/who-report-animals-source-covid-1... 4. https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-world-news-health-scien...
[+] [-] TruthsIsBad|4 years ago|reply
If people who are intelligent can’t handle ideas that aren’t “palatable” to them, what’s the fucking purpose of your academy? lol. It’s like asking atheists to care about your church’s rules. You’re just stupid for not understanding that they aren’t participating with you any longer.