Experts from a world that no longer exists • Hacker News Board

Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists

#141

Post by SideQuark » Sat, Nov 20, 2021, 9:00 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #130

nly wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is we're all now dependent on stock market performance to make retirement feasible. Employer guaranteed defined-benefit pension schemes are dead. My uncles pension scheme was structured to pay out 1.5% of his final salary, inflation adjusted for the rest of his life, for each year he'd worked. He worked at one company his whole career, from age 18 to age 55, when he retired. Factoring in his mortgage, whi…

>He worked at one company his whole career, Which was one of the issues with defined benefit plans. They were structured around long employee tenure. Move around every few years and you basically got no pension most of the time. I personally think it's unfortunate that most people won't have defined benefit plans any longer. (I'm glad I'll have one from a long-ago 10+ year job whenever I decide to start collecting.)…

>most people won't have defined benefit plans any longer.

Most people never had them. Only a minority of middle and upper class white men had them for a short period in time.

Here's some historical tables [1]. For example, in 1975, 44M people were in one, decently less than half of workers.

[1] https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ebsa/researchers/stat...

Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists

#142

Post by ryukafalz » Sat, Nov 20, 2021, 9:02 PM UTC

lettergram wrote: post #132

One thing I also find interesting are when people think the rules change when they really don’t. For instance, Green energy is the future yes, but it’ll take generations. So people assume the rules change faster than reality.

It better not take generations! We don't have that kind of time.

Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists

#143

Post by padthai » Sat, Nov 20, 2021, 9:14 PM UTC

flir wrote: post #77

nickdothutton wrote: post #23

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…

That generational thing sounds a lot like IT's eternal flip-flop between thick clients and thin clients. (I'm fully expecting "web browsers are too thick, we need a thin alternative" to appear any day now). On the back-end, serverless is time-sharing. Your attempt-fail-stigmatise curve has a lot in common with the Gartner hype cycle.

I would argue that the birth of Gemini and the (timid) Gopher revival have to do with this. They are very far from being mainstream though.

Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists

#144

Post by clairity » Sat, Nov 20, 2021, 9:18 PM UTC

dsizzle wrote: post #88

This 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…

we avoid negativity during brainstorming to create psychological safety. that in turn expands the boundaries of creativity. the process doesn't end there however, which is what your criticism sems to assume, since we need to winnow down the ideas generated to a feasible subset, and then further to a pursued option. this latter part is where criticism (but not negativity) is employed to iterate toward the chosen option. literally no one argues the strawman that there can be no criticism during decision-making.

optimizing both divergence and convergence processes leads to good decision-making, not just one or the other.

Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists

#145

Post by kristjansson » Sat, Nov 20, 2021, 9:29 PM UTC

djbebs wrote: post #131

kristjansson wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One wonders about the actuarial assumptions made by your uncle’s former employer and how, or if, they expected to meet that obligation.

If history is any indication the answer to both of those were "they were wrong" and "caused severe financial issues to the company, if it didn't bankrupt them entirely"

Exactly, the point of the comment being that generous defined benefit pension schemes probably aren’t some paneceal solution that capital is now withholding, but that they were at best a burden and at worst a lie.

Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists

#146

Post by polskibus » Sat, Nov 20, 2021, 9:31 PM UTC

Timing is king. If you know when the current experts will become the old fools, and bet on it, you can be the richest man ever. It’s akin to knowing when the stock will rise or fall. Close to impossible unless you know more than others (and therefore become an expert ).

Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists

#147

Post by musingsole » Sat, Nov 20, 2021, 9:31 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #128

ericjang wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't believe in the "wisdom of the crowds" ?

Here is a set of people. On a given subject, the median position is likely to be at least reasonable. That's the "wisdom of the crowds". Here is a set of experts. Within the area of their expertise, the median position is probably pretty close to right. The intersection of their views are almost certainly right (though it may be the empty set). But what you can't do is take the union of the views of a set of people,…

Union vs. intersection vs. outlier weighting is a beautiful way to put this.

Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists

#148

Post by nly » Sat, Nov 20, 2021, 9:37 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #130

nly wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is we're all now dependent on stock market performance to make retirement feasible. Employer guaranteed defined-benefit pension schemes are dead. My uncles pension scheme was structured to pay out 1.5% of his final salary, inflation adjusted for the rest of his life, for each year he'd worked. He worked at one company his whole career, from age 18 to age 55, when he retired. Factoring in his mortgage, whi…

>He worked at one company his whole career, Which was one of the issues with defined benefit plans. They were structured around long employee tenure. Move around every few years and you basically got no pension most of the time. I personally think it's unfortunate that most people won't have defined benefit plans any longer. (I'm glad I'll have one from a long-ago 10+ year job whenever I decide to start collecting.)…

In the UK the law was changed such that people were given the freedom to transfer out of their defined benefit schemes, and most were paid handsome lump sums for doing so because the schemes were desperately underfunded and wanted people out

Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists

#149

Post by musingsole » Sat, Nov 20, 2021, 9:38 PM UTC

streamofdigits wrote: post #115

Experts tend to be specialists, focused on silos and deep dives into specific domains. The world is instead getting radically interconnected as "everything" is represented - more or less faithfully - by fungible bits. We are going through an "anti-specialization" phase, where everything is in principle connected to everything. This amorphous digital ocean phase will probably not last, but it might be decades before a…

In the future, every individual must be an expert on a single subject to a currently unimaginable depth. However, expertise must be simultaneously robbed of prestige and its value relegated to only its utility.

Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists

#150

Post by nly » Sat, Nov 20, 2021, 9:44 PM UTC

kristjansson wrote: post #129

nly wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is we're all now dependent on stock market performance to make retirement feasible. Employer guaranteed defined-benefit pension schemes are dead. My uncles pension scheme was structured to pay out 1.5% of his final salary, inflation adjusted for the rest of his life, for each year he'd worked. He worked at one company his whole career, from age 18 to age 55, when he retired. Factoring in his mortgage, whi…

One wonders about the actuarial assumptions made by your uncle’s former employer and how, or if, they expected to meet that obligation.

The financial planning is the same, the difference is just in who takes responsibility.

The bottom line is that many people had this as a benefit and now very few do. What's unchanged is most people spend less time thinking about their pension throughout their lifespan than they do about almost anything else you can imagine, but they really should be because it's all on their shoulders now.

Here in the UK it seems we have a whole generation a couple of decades away from retirement poverty.