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The Limits of Expertise

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Re: The Limits of Expertise

#41

Post by throw2016 »

You must differentiate technical and scientific expertise from things like economic theorizing. You can't build a bridge without expertise or a car or a plane. Those need serious expertise, experience and certainty of the 1+1=2 variety. No one is questioning this expertise.

But things like economics, what are they experts in? In the general markets, stock markets, free markets, policy, risk, trade, banking, money, human behavior? They seem to lack an understanding of why things happen, and yet are happy to make sweeping judgements that seem to push very specific ideologies based on dubious assumptions of human behavior. And here is the problem, nothing in their course material make them experts in human behavior.

This is what is causing the public loss of confidence along with the media and think tanks who push these narratives. And the economics profession at the moment is going through a crisis of confidence, a lot of the models have been revealed to be based on completely unrealistic assumptions, data is fudged, and things like GDP, globalization and the neoliberal ideology that have been pushed as 'unquestioned truth' are now under the scanner.

Re: The Limits of Expertise

#42

Post by extralego »

Fricken wrote: post #20
extralego wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re making unjust light of the phrase “skin in the game”. Your version is more like “potential monetary gains in the game”. To overlook the difference is to undermine the utility of the phrase. Simply, risking one’s own skin is anything but equivalent to risking potential monetary gains , and all the more so when the remainder of your life’s financial needs are secure and the profits at stake is mere bonus. My und…

To make any claim at all you have at the very least wagered your integrity. At the other extreme you've got someone like the free soloist Alex Honnold, who wagers his life every time he scales a cliff without safety equipment. So what does 'skin in the game' even mean? It's kind of irrelevant. Although when Taleb talks about it, he makes it clear he refering largely to financial risk.

>So what does ‘skin in the game’ even mean? It’s kind of irrelevant.

No it’s not. It’s precisely the topic of debate. I see where you’re coming from though. Your concern is with the author’s authority over the phrase, whereas mine is with the nature of the critique, namely the carelessness and inaccuracy resulting in it’s practice.

I have never read this book, but it’s synopsis alludes no more than free market theory; numbingly basic material. Does this catch-phrase add anything to the argument? I cannot imagine how it would. This is nuance-free run-of-the-mill narcissist apologism as motivational speak. Don’t be fooled.

Re: The Limits of Expertise

#43

Post by AnimalMuppet »

gowld wrote: post #28
dilap wrote: post #12

I'm committing the sin of commenting w/o having read the article yet, so this might be duplicative or orthogonal, but: Without feedback, there is no real expertise. Most experts are in domains w/o feedback, so they are mostly full of shit. Good blog posts exploring this topic a bit: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/05/dominic-cummings-on-fi... (above is a summary/intro to following:) https://dominiccummings.com/201…

The reason "experts" have such a bad reputation is that anyone who is a qualified expert in something has a more specific title relevant to their expertise, where their reputation can be judged: Scientist, Professor, Author, Pilot, CEO

People have credentials, and they have areas of expertise. You get in trouble when you assume that the area of expertise matches the area of the credential.

Example: CEO. If you're a CEO, you know how to run a company, right? So if you know how to run Pepsi, then you know how to run Apple, right? In practice, it turns out, no you don't.

Example: You're an atomic scientist with a specialty in nuclear weapons. People interview you about the danger of nuclear war, because you're an "expert". But you're not an expert on the military, or on international relations, or on game theory. You have an amateur's understanding of such matters - maybe slightly better than the mouthy guy at the bar, but not much. But they're interviewing you for serious, mainstream media because you're an "expert". (Note: I don't have a concrete instance that I'm pointing at in this paragraph, unlike the previous one. None the less, I think that people get interviewed as "experts" far outside their actual expertise. And some "experts" like to stretch their "expert-ness" to add weight to their pronouncements on areas in which they are amateurs.)

Re: The Limits of Expertise

#44

Post by EADGBE »

All hail general-ism!

It works well for most things.

Around the house, I generally have an idea of how to fix things. I only know enough to know when I should call an expert. It saves a ton of money.

I'd like to consider myself a generalist web developer too, able to build infrastructure from the ground up, set up the DB, Get a backend API, get some pages going, etc. I won't pretend I know more about Angular/Java/MySQL/CI than you. But I'm open to how experts do this stuff. I just like learning, and I enjoy grasping the big concepts more than the minute stuff.

I'm really going places, I tell you. I've got upper management written all over me.

Re: The Limits of Expertise

#45

Post by zimablue »

dilap wrote: post #12

I'm committing the sin of commenting w/o having read the article yet, so this might be duplicative or orthogonal, but: Without feedback, there is no real expertise. Most experts are in domains w/o feedback, so they are mostly full of shit. Good blog posts exploring this topic a bit: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/05/dominic-cummings-on-fi... (above is a summary/intro to following:) https://dominiccummings.com/201…

So there's no such thing as a historian?

Re: The Limits of Expertise

#46

Post by rsj_hn »

s3m4j wrote: post #27
smacktoward wrote: post #19

> Nobody says, “I want someone unqualified to be my president, therefore I also want someone unqualified to be my surgeon.” Nobody doubts the value of the expertise of an engineer or a pilot. If planes were crashing every other day, you'd better believe people would be doubting pilots. Trust is earned , not owed. And the reason people have trouble trusting our political and economic elites is because they keep crashi…

That's almost a rhetorical question, but... How do you define " crashing the plane " here ? There's only one plane and it's still going. History hasn't ended.

There is a way to measure economic and political performance other than "I have not yet annihilated the planet" -- I mean, that's a pretty low bar. In Italy, GDP per capita is below what it was since the Euro was introduced[1] in 2000. In the U.S., In 2014 the middle class was poorer than it was in 1989[2]. Real median household income has been flat for since 1965, increasing by only $4000 in chained 2016 dollars over that 50 year period[3], whereas the costs of necessities such as housing, college tuition, and healthcare have gone up much faster than income, creating a lot of anxiety.

When things get better for a majority of the people (rather than just for the top), the population is happy with their leadership. When there is a record of failure, then cries of "well, we didn't kill off all life on earth" and "we are experts" are not well received as reasons to keep the current regime in power.

[1]https://tradingeconomics.com/italy/gdp-per-capita [2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/01/the-m... [3] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2017/09/1...

Re: The Limits of Expertise

#47

Post by mannykannot »

s3m4j wrote: post #27
smacktoward wrote: post #19

> Nobody says, “I want someone unqualified to be my president, therefore I also want someone unqualified to be my surgeon.” Nobody doubts the value of the expertise of an engineer or a pilot. If planes were crashing every other day, you'd better believe people would be doubting pilots. Trust is earned , not owed. And the reason people have trouble trusting our political and economic elites is because they keep crashi…

That's almost a rhetorical question, but... How do you define " crashing the plane " here ? There's only one plane and it's still going. History hasn't ended.

"Crashing the plane" is not the best metaphor. In the case of politics and economics, we have, broadly speaking, two tribes of experts who disagree, at a fundamental level, on many things. Furthermore, they have both been repeatedly blindsided by events - their expertise seems to consist mostly of being able to explain, in great detail and certainty, but always after the event, why the opposing tribe's fundamental beliefs inevitably caused the problem.

Re: The Limits of Expertise

#48

Post by otakucode »

embulldogs99 wrote: post #11

"suffice it to say, the complex manoeuvring of some extremely bright and learned people unwittingly triggered the financial crisis." So it wasnt the bad loans that were given to people who couldnt repay at variable interest rates prone for increases in the future? If everyone involved was truly educated, they likely would nothavs taken those loans in the first place... Dont confuse free market behavior (all people in…

The financial crisis also wasn't very "unwitting." The banks knew that placing first large benefits to selling more loans, and then making it a requirement to remain employed would lead their employees to issue bad loans. They knew that loaning out 30x their capital was dangerous. They knew that when they reclassified garbage-class debt as AAA that they were lying through their teeth and were essentially guaranteeing a crash. But they also knew that they wouldn't bear the consequences for it. And they were right. The system in place makes it ideal optimal behavior to provoke such crashes for those involved in the financial services industry. It resulted in them receiving $1+ trillion, with nearly no change in regulation. When they want another trillion, they know they can count on getting it.

Re: The Limits of Expertise

#49

Post by andyidsinga »

THIS :

> However, it is worth drawing a distinction between these two types of expertise—the kind people question, and the kind people don’t. In short, people value expertise in closed systems, but are distrustful of expertise in open systems.

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