Is Barbara Ferrer an "expert" even though she has no medical degree?
Doesn't she know the facts and science that masking spreads germs?
Experts from a world that no longer exists
51–60 of 267 posts
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#52Is London Breed an expert in sucking dick?
Is Kamala Harris an expert in getting rugburns on her knees?
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#53Is Joe Biden an expert in fucking little kids including his daughter Ashley in the shower (her words)?
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#54Is Gavin Newsom an expert in putting hair gel into his hair so he can be a proper hair-gel nazi?
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#55Is Nancy Pelosi an expert in insider trading? Damn, I wish I could get a lucrative government job like that.
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#56> Some expertise is timeless. A few behaviors always repeat. They’re often the most important things to pay attention to. AKA: wisdom. Seek, cherish, and protect that. Wisdom is functional. 'Expertise' is often knowledge if the current/historical state of affairs. When a dam breaks: > It usually means other parts of the system have evolved in a way that allows what was once impossible to now become practical. The sta…
TIL Overton Window: "The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window A very useful concept.
The window, and the ways political agents try to move it in one direction or another, explains a lot of modern discourse
It intersects with Chomsky's ideas about manufacturing consent quite nicely too
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#57What I found interesting is that the period for reappearance of “failed ideas” is roughly the length of a career. Coincidence or due to any real effect I don’t know. I wrote a little about it here: “Don’t be discouraged by the failure of technology or approaches of the past. If the problem is still important after all this time then it’s a problem worth solving. Don’t avoid unsuccessful solutions. Avoid insignificant…
I went through grad school and I saw how change comes about one funeral at a time. A big shot professor that has made their name with their pet theory/work will fiercely defend it against competing ideas, and people will defer to their expertise. It's not scientific, it's egotistic. They are a wall against progress that gets removed upon death. These professors can also create a dogma through their students who also…
I can't help but wonder how much better our governments would operate if the median age of their workers were somewhat lower (IIRC that's around 45).
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read a while back that scientific ideas usually take about 50 years to be accepted. Which means essentially that they never are accepted, the people who disagree with them just die and the next generation embrace them. Einstein pretty much hated quantum mechanics and ended up making a bunch of discoveries while making every effort to disprove it. So if that’s how scientists do it - who should be the most amenable p…
I think the new ideas get accepted when either the old guard die, and/or an undeniable technology gets created by use of the new idea.
“A new scientific truth does not generally triumph by persuading its opponents and getting them to admit their errors, but rather by its opponents gradually dying out and giving way to a new generation that is raised on it. […] An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.”
— Max Planck, 1948
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#59This sounds like a bunch of boring truisms when stated this way, but perhaps a little extra insight can be wrung out by binding this to some more specific claims.
There's a corner of the cognitive science literature about iterated learning in a Bayesian framing. A question it asked was roughly, "If we partition a dataset over a sequence of agents who each see only a slice, and we allow each agent to communicate something to the next agent down the line, what must be true of the communication between those agents for them to learn the same thing as a single agent who saw all of the data?" And roughly, for the sequence to converge to the same posterior as a single agent, each agent had to adopt an unbiased estimate of the previous agent's posterior as their prior. See esp work from Griffiths and colleagues.
In a somewhat looser analogy, there's a family of techniques for distributed convex optimization (like ADMM), where a group of agents are collectively trying to optimize a function over data, and each agent sees only a slice of that data. Note especially that the way the data is partitioned can be entirely arbitrary, including e.g. training an SVM classifier where some agents see only positive data points. And for the group of agents to collectively converge to the global optimum, each local agent basically adds a large term to the function which penalizes disagreement with the other agents.
In slightly hand-wavey terms, in either case, for the agents to reach a "correct" conclusion as a group, each needs to be able to give potentially an arbitrarily high weight to the information distilled from others. In the iterated learning case, the posterior distribution received from a previous agent may have more information than the likelihood distribution of the data that an individual agent sees. In the optimization case, the consensus term may contribute more to the local loss than the data that an individual agent sees.
So in contexts where one is actually trying to solve the _same problem_ as a group, placing very high weight on the honest information received from previous experts can be critical.
But in cases when you're _not_ all working on the same problem, it can be disastrous.
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#60The thing with believing that this time is different is that your worst case is you fail but your best case is you succeed. The thing with believing that every time is the same is that you guarantee mediocrity.
When looking to the probability cone of future outcomes, some of us accept wider cones that encompass positive and negative outcomes. Others accept narrow cones where they constrain outcomes.
I personally fall into the former category and also believe that societies that enable both kinds of people (well, all along the spectrum of cones) will succeed.
I also believe that the biggest factor constraining your cone parameter is how much you have. The more you have, the less willing you are to expand your cone. This is because human beings are highly loss averse. I have seen this in my own life.
The people most able to succeed are those who (intentionally or unintentionally) have a cone with the Markov property. No matter how far along the cone they are, the remainder of the cone looks the same.
But Western society is prosperous and so the natural loss aversion leads to risk aversion. And so the balance shifts towards preservation. This article, then, is a message to that aspect of ours that is listening for the possibility that, perhaps, this time really is different.