Ask HN: Are people only smart until they talk about things you know more about?

Listening to people talk about things I know a lot about teaches me to be quite about things I’m not an expert it.

I think it's important to differentiate between "smart" and "knowledgable".

I have a new coworker who isn't very knowledgable, but she's able to understand new topics quickly, once I've explained them. She's often nervous about her lack of knowledge—rightly so, in all honesty—but I also think she's exceptionally smart. Certainly more than she realizes.

I feel humans in general tend to highly regard the words of highly successful (or rich) people. Which in turn convinces successful/rich people that they are smart.

You could see that happening on Twitter during covid. VCs, who specialise in tech, were suddenly experts on medicine as well. Because the feedback loop has convinced them they are smart so it's hard for them to not buy into that.

And just to be clear these people are wicked smart a lot of times. Just that expertise in one area doesn't often translate to all others.

Depends on what you mean by "smart." High intellect in the sense of a brain that learns new ideas and recognizes patterns well isn't the same thing as knowledge, experience, wisdom, whatever. It is easy for someone with raw brain talent to become good at rhetoric and convincingly arguing for something. This includes to themselves. In arenas where their own knowledge is incomplete or there simply isn't knowledge at all because there is more uncertainty than human brains are comfortable dealing with, this often has the effect that they can very convincingly wrong, or just convinced they're correct even if the claim they're making can't be known to be true or not.

To be clear, I think I'm as guilty of this as anyone. It is very hard to recognize the limits of your own knowledge. It isn't really a matter of being "smart" as I see it. It's a matter of discipline and intellectual humility. You need to very intentionally practice checking yourself, being less certain on purpose, seeking to find knowledge rather than spread it, and even knowing all of that, I still find it very hard to do.

I don't think this is exactly the same thing as Gellman Amnesia, either. I'm not even sure Crichton was really correct about that kind of thing or at least not saying what people seem to be taking away from it. It can easily be the case that a person or publication you're trusting to be correct about something in one arena of knowledge really is correct there, but still doesn't know much about something you're an expert in. I think it probably is fair to apply this to reporters, because no disrespect intended, but they're not experts in anything except reporting, not even whatever specific beat they're assigned to. They're relying on the expertise of others to be correct but they may not be all that qualified to really evaluate the claims they're furthering. But it's equally bad to universally trusting everything you read in a newspaper to just assume they're wrong about everything because they were ever wrong about one thing you happen to know a lot about. That may be the case, but you shouldn't just assume that. This gets back to probabilistic thinking. You should understand that the probability of a claim you're reading somewhere being correct is rarely if ever 0 or 1, and your updates on the trustworthiness of a source when they prove to be correct or incorrect one time should not only be multiply by infinity or multiply by 0. You have to learn to live with uncertainty.

You are right. We run the risk of building a society (or at least an online environment) built upon the confidence/mistakes of the loud fools.