71–80 of 267 posts
There was an amusing example of this yesterday with The Economist saying, `The sharp increase in inflation over the past year has blindsided many economists. Almost no one saw it coming` https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/1461651190144503808
ZeroHedge has predicted 83 of the last 7 downturns.
I enjoyed this so much. The stories about Ford were terrific. A lot of "wisdom" is contextual and gets mistaken for universal. We learn "X works" and, having been burned by everything else we tried, jealously guard the value of X as very special and precious. Scars obtained in the process of obtaining expertise are likely an underrecognized factor in experts becoming ossified in their opinions. They learned that ever…
Something I've noticed in the pandemic: there's a pretty big gap between what people remember "the experts" saying vs what, if you listened to one or two qualified professionals and kept them straight, actually said. Individual experts—the good ones at least—seem to hold up pretty well even if they didn't see everything coming. It's the widespread sampling of chyrons and faces that inevitably says everything all of t…
Yes it seems like a combination of magnifying and muddling information. Say, for example, a cancer researcher makes a statement like "Red wine contains compounds that might protect from some cancers" - not very interesting as news. So it gets magnified to "Red wine CURES cancer". Next, another expert says "excessive use of alcohol can increases the risk of certain cancers". Of course the news converts this to "Alcoho…
This quote made me feel better: "Some of the biggest businesses of the last 10 years are all in industries that were the starkest examples of stupidity 20 years ago." I'm still a little bitter from VC experiences 20 years ago. In 1998 my friends and I built a browser-based (Java applet) collaborative word processor and spreadsheet called Office Wherever (o-w.com). We shopped it to a dozen VCs and all went ROFLMAOWTFB…
Nobody wants to be a patent troll, but being too early and filing patents can set you up for late revenue. Even if it's just watching for patent trolls and licensing your patents to the victims to double troll.
What 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…
Your attempt-fail-stigmatise curve has a lot in common with the Gartner hype cycle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly the reason why I left academia. Egos competing for space, money or talk-time to defend themselves not the progress of science.
We tend to romanticise it, but in the end it's just another job. It shouldn't, because selling you doing science is not the same as doing science, but on the other hand social expectations are that you must have a job, so what kind of exemption were we hoping for exactly? Once you realise it's ordinary people looking for whatever ordinary people look for anywhere else everything falls into place. Some science gets do…
What 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 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…
This is to some degree the point made in Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
Something I've noticed in the pandemic: there's a pretty big gap between what people remember "the experts" saying vs what, if you listened to one or two qualified professionals and kept them straight, actually said. Individual experts—the good ones at least—seem to hold up pretty well even if they didn't see everything coming. It's the widespread sampling of chyrons and faces that inevitably says everything all of t…
One chapter later: "The fool listens to most of it" (also paraphrased).
If you don't have the time to sort it all out, don't listen to all the viewpoints. Society, collectively, is insane - it believes so many contradictory things that could not all possibly be true. You can't listen to society or "they say" as a guide. You'll get nonsense.
But part of this is on the news, especially television and internet news. They need a hot take for this hour to draw eyeballs. It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to be new and different. But if you're trying to follow it to learn what to do to protect yourself in the pandemic, it's a hopelessly self-contradictory jumble. People wind up saying "They lied to us! They're still lying to us!" The problem is that "they" - the "they" that the media present to us - is too big a set.
Now, individual experts still can be mistaken, give bad advice, or even lie. But no expert is as confused as the union of all the experts.