Now my own way to look at this, at least from a software product perspective but perhaps it's applicable everywhere: "Everything always gets easy if you wait long enough." It's almost a motto at this point, because there are so many technical challenges that prevented this or that product in the past, or more likely, made them niche utilities that required deep expertise to maintain. These utilities suddenly become building blocks that are simple and commoditized, allowing larger products to be built where before it was impossible, or at least very difficult. For anyone starting a software business: You can enter a crowded market as long as most of the difficult problems have almost been solved, and if you can establish that beach head, then acquire and sustain customers quickly enough, you can win, because everything is perpetually getting easier. The downside of course is that eventually your product will be commoditized into oblivion, but that's part of the game.
Experts from a world that no longer exists
101–110 of 267 posts
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#102This line is what I think of whenever the cryptocurrency vitriol comes out here:
"""
Pets.com was mocked, but Chewy is now a $30 billion business. Webvan failed, but Instacart and UberEats are now thriving. eToys was a joke, but now look at Amazon. Some of the biggest businesses of the last 10 years are all in industries that were the starkest examples of stupidity 20 years ago.
"""
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 opponent…
Fuck. I don't have that kind of time.
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#104This 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 somet…
> 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. Another "loose attempt to make this argument rigorous" might be to invoke Grim Trigger [1] strategies from repeated PD games. A very large negative weight is placed on "dishonest" behavior across a communication channel (game). [1] htt…
Of course, this is only available in certain scenarios.
A Gen Z person at the beginning of their financial lives may want to _discount_ the advice of baby-boomers as having come from experience in a structurally different economy. But they have very little mechanism to _retaliate_ against the boomers who supported state university tuition increasing faster than inflation for decades.
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#105Something 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…
Some of this is a conflation of who the experts are, as well as hindsight bias on that question. If you look at say Fauci or Trevor Bedford's predictions, sure, they were pretty accurate (with some confusion in the middle of the pandemic when everything was confused). But if you take Rand Paul as your "expert" (also a medical doctor, but in a different specialty), you would've had a very different sense of what "the experts" were saying. And in the moment, you don't have the benefit of hindsight to judge the credibility of expert predictions, only their credentials.
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#106It's weird reading this as someone who identifies strongly as Gen X, witnessing how we can't seem to address existential threats like global climate change until the Boomers retire. Or a thousand other problems.
I've spent the last 20+ years under a near-constant form of gaslighting where everybody told me my ideas would never work. Having to watch time and again as a different version of me wins the internet lottery.
Dunno about all of you, but I'm kinda over it.
My dad (a Boomer and self-proclaimed radical in the 1960/70s environmental spirit) reminded my just yesterday though that not all Boomers are alike, and that stereotypes hurt. I wish we had a different term for people who self-ossify, glorify ignorance, and take it upon themselves to dictate to others why they're wrong. I'm thinking of guys like Mitch McConnell and Milton Friedman, so sure in their certitude that it's inconceivable to them that their theology could actively harm the modern world. How do we resist such glacial forms of resignation?
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#107This seems to assume that experts' advice can only be valued (or not) as an appeal to authority. But that would ignore that experts can also provide _explanations_: "This won't work because this subsystem would violate the laws of physics" e.g. -- and that explanation might then spur someone to find an equivalent subsystem without that flaw, or perhaps one would find a flaw in the initial reasoning, or whatever. Simi…
From my experience, many of the problems can be solved by spending time on extended introspection. The problem with authorities is that they often don't have a firsthand experience of the problems itself.
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#108It's weird reading this as someone who identifies strongly as Gen X, witnessing how we can't seem to address existential threats like global climate change until the Boomers retire. Or a thousand other problems. I've spent the last 20+ years under a near-constant form of gaslighting where everybody told me my ideas would never work. Having to watch time and again as a different version of me wins the internet lottery…
Unfortunately , as a fellow Gen X, "Boomer" is turning into a term for "older than me and a little more successful/further along in life". Hate that some younger people are calling me a Boomer, when we didn't have pensions _or_ 401ks, our families were gutted with parents divorcing, etc.
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#109Everything is tied to the present situation. My past failures could be someone else tomorrow successes.
But what about human nature knowledge?
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
This doesn't make any sense. Aging is certainly a problem that needs to be solved, but the idea that you expressed here seems to be that younger people are better at their jobs - which is very wrong. This line of thinking is akin to "If less of the postmen had diabetes, I would get more of my mail faster!" Don't fall for these ageist logical inconsistencies
> Aging is certainly a problem that needs to be solved
by that logic, childhood is also a problem that needs to be solved. I have to get metaphysical to argue against the mindset, but IMO the origin of seeing aging as a problem stems from seeing death as the opposite of life.