> politics: that rare area where there are no real experts, and it's every man for himself
There are experts, but things are so politicized that everyone dislikes them (the acts don't agree with anyone's partisan position) and reads what is appealing. I think that was the OP's point, but it's a dangerous notion to think we all know politics roughly equally well.
Political science can be highly informative and predictive, as can research in adjacent fields such as international relations. It transforms my understanding of what others are saying (with partisans being reliably absurd).
Specifically in terms of being predictive you might be interested in reading Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? by Philip E. Tetlock if you are not familiar with it already. He tried to empirically test experts political judgement and the main conclusion was pretty much everybody was bad. He now runs the good judgement project which trying to measure good forecasting skills to figure out who really is good at it. It was very eye opening to me at the time.
IIRC the broad conclusion was that "experts" are really specialized, whereas predicting political developments requires a broader awareness. Hedgehogs and foxes.
I studied politics and history. In my experience, there is also a bias towards writing exceptionally partisan things. I used to write things that were hedging, and which were summaries of the argument. Invariably, these papers scored significantly lower than papers which took a position (whether that was accurate or not).
Of course, university isn't reality. But my point is that people do not find realistic opinions that interesting. Saying "I don't know" or "both sides have merit" is sometimes accurate but never interesting. Society selects for this.
I also worked in finance which exposes you to a reasonably fast feedback loop between opinion and reality. I met people who had multi-decade records of crushing it, and they usually had very anodyne takes. You come in expecting they have access to some higher form of truth...in reality, they are just better at seeing what is already there.
You see this, particularly, when a famed investor says the market is over-valued. Inevitably, they will get lambasted publicly. But you realise that their view is usually one that works long-term, that is quantifiable, that uses reason...everyone else just wants emotion.
The difference isn't knowledge. You can have huge knowledge, you can be rewarded heavily for being right, you can be a media "expert"...but if you aren't interested in reality, it doesn't matter.
I don't think it is about avoiding having strong views either but it has to be strong views, weakly held. With time I think a minority of the population realises that some people will have the same opinion regardless of what facts are presented to them. What is frustrating is that society reproduces so much of this nonsense.
I am a fan of systems/tools which reward those with better models of objective reality and the likely future.
I am intrigued by prediction markets as a way to give feedback to people's models of reality and how accurate they are in extrapolating trends, and to reward those who are better able to predict the future. It's a potential way to introduce 'skin in the game', both from a reputational and financial perspective.
Is that 'media expert' claiming Country X will be a dictatorship in 2 years because their political opposition won an election? Define terms and ask them to make a bet, and let's see how that plays out.
After awhile, you can start to see people's track records, and the skin in the game pressure may incentivize better epistemics before making claims.
I don't think prediction markets make sense. The information about whether a country will become a dictatorship is usually private, and impossible to obtain. It isn't like a betting market where the relevant information is public.
I probably agree with your aims. I think that systems should exist to make better decisions but there is limit because no-one can make perfect decisions (and it is probably more important to consider robustness at that point). I think attempting to reward predictions makes no sense, everyone is prone to these biases. I don't think rewarding a certain group of people makes that any better.
One part of markets that people often get wrong is that sometimes markets are totally wrong. With Enron, the information that the company was fraudulent was publicly available, and relatively easy to find. But the price for the stock was set by people who didn't want to find it. Mayweather vs McGregor...crazy odds. In 2012, the US prediction market Intrade had wildly inaccurate odds for the Presidential election, this was a market that was trading hundreds of thousands per day. Markets work most of the time, they don't work all the time (I would say financial markets are the best evidence of this, you see stuff that makes no sense almost all the time because investors have such different aims...you think no-one is this stupid, then you see it happen in a megacap stock worth hundreds of billions, and your perspective on human reasoning changes significantly).
For the record, I don't think prediction markets are perfect and solve all problems.
I also don't think solutions/tools should be discarded because they are not perfect.
From your examples, it seems like your knock against prediction markets are the fact the aggregated predictions don't end being correct at times? Of course that's going to happen, and I don't necessary see instances of the wrong aggregated predictions of a market as a bug, but a feature. Human populations are wrong about things all the time in the aggregate. What better way to get better at decision-making than getting feedback on how we are wrong?
My argument for prediction markets was not for generating knowledge in the aggregate from all of the individual users' predictions. It was centered on the individual front as a way to reward individuals who are better able to predict the future. The uber context in which I was commenting was around who should be considered an expert. Prediction markets are one potential tool (albeit not perfect) to measure individual's conception of current reality and future reality.
Right, but the point is that prediction markets remove the subjectivity, and I am saying they don't. They are just wrong in different ways.
Rewarding individuals? So we swap one set of "experts" for another? The point of this is that no-one is an expert. The problems are created not because we don't have prediction markets, but because we treat "experts" with reverence.
The comment about randomness you made to another reply...with any event, there is some part of the outcome that is unpredictable. You could have perfect information, and still would be unable to predict it every time. Some events have no information that can be used to predict them, so predicting is just the event's previous frequency or last value.
It would depend on the underlying event. The reason we have financial markets isn't to predict things, it is to fund things that need funding, and the price mechanism guides that for better or worse.
Creating an artificial prediction market is more like gambling where people are transferring risk for its own sake. Nothing wrong with that but I am not sure what the purpose would be. As said, these markets are also unlikely to add any new information either because the kind of events being talked about some largely random.
Would it be fair to say that there is some value, but the quantity is unknown?
> Creating an artificial prediction market is more like gambling where people are transferring risk for its own sake.
I suppose this is part of what is involved, but "transferring risk for its own sake" doesn't seem like a comprehensive description of what they are.
> Nothing wrong with that but I am not sure what the purpose would be.
I think it's useful to always consider that there may be more to see than what catches one's eye.
> As said, these markets are also unlikely to add any new information either because the kind of events being talked about some largely random.
If I rephrase this to:
>> Because [the kind of events being talked about are largely random] it logically follows that [these markets are unlikely to add any new information].
...it seems to me that this is an imperfect way of thinking about it. Perhaps I have mischaracterized your intended meaning?
Yep, I have been there. Example (sorry to use another finance story): the market today is overvalued by any logic. Valuation, 0% returns for next ten years. Equity risk premium, max 2% real. Contributions that are valued most heavily are complex and surprising. If you say the market is overvalued when it has gone up 15%/year for a decade then people are expecting something very big...not some nerd talking about equity risk premia.
I think this is the difference between how humans reason emotionally and how humans reason logically.
Finance is a bad example because most people lose it when money is involved. But you see this in other areas where it is very hard to make a contribution if that contribution isn't surprising, controversial, or shocking in some way. It has to have emotional valence. This isn't universal. Some areas of study don't have that culture, some organizations have clear decision-making processes that try to stop this...but everyone is prone to emotional reasoning.
This seemed so idealistic and a bit silly when I was a kid, but now (especially now) ...
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
> But my point is that people do not find realistic opinions that interesting. Saying "I don't know" or "both sides have merit" is sometimes accurate but never interesting. Society selects for this.
I completely agree with you, and "Society selects for this" is a decent explanation (I would add in culture) - but isn't it strange that there seem to be so few outliers? And I'm not talking about disinterested centrists, but more like people who are interested in the meta aspect, the fact that approximately no one is interested in what is actually true (that they do not know, that both sides typically do have some merit), especially when compared to how people really are (they do not know that they do not know, they (commonly) cannot realize or even consider the possibility that each side usually has some valid points....rather, a very common phrase I hear nowadays is "I've had enough of this 'both sides!'").
Isn't it strange that this is the nature of the system that we live in, and isn't it even stranger that hardly anyone seems to find it odd?
> What is frustrating is that society reproduces so much of this nonsense.
It's frustrating for sure, but if you think about it: why wouldn't it produce nonsense? Like, we've been having these sorts of issues for decades - we see more of it (and I suspect more exists) because of the internet, but we haven't really changed much about the way we do things (if anything, any new tool we get is used to crank the insanity even higher), so does it make sense to expect it to improve over time?
> And I'm not talking about disinterested centrists, but more like people who are interested in the meta aspect, the fact that approximately no one is interested in what is actually true (that they do not know, that both sides typically do have some merit)
I think you can find plenty of that kind of discussion the academic/professional sphere, though it's small in proportion to the greatly increased radicalized chatter. That's part of the point of radicalization and propaganda - to politicize everything, to the point where there is no truth, just partisan claims and suspicion. They are doing an effective job, but we don't have to go along with it - I simply refuse to read the partisan stuff; there is plenty to read, especially from the entirety of human history before the last several years.
> we've been having these sorts of issues for decades
Polarization and, IIRC, radicalization, have increased dramatically recently.
> I think you can find plenty of that kind of discussion the academic/professional sphere, though it's small in proportion to the greatly increased radicalized chatter.
Agree. You can find "plenty", of a certain quality (but how high?) Compare this to the activity and quality of discussion in the history of philosophy though, an academic undertaking that seems to have taken a seat at the kids table in modern times.
> That's part of the point of radicalization and propaganda - to politicize everything, to the point where there is no truth, just partisan claims and suspicion.
I firmly believe that much of what you are referring to is to a large degree consciously ~engineered. But also at the same time, I think we should be extremely mindful of emergence.
> They are doing an effective job, but we don't have to go along with it - I simply refuse to read the partisan stuff; there is plenty to read, especially from the entirety of human history before the last several years.
I prefer reading some of it on an ongoing basis and studying its nature, the ~techniques, the effects, how it alters the perception of the public, etc. Study it as a system, understand how it works, why things are the way they are, how it can be influenced, etc.
> Polarization and, IIRC, radicalization, have increased dramatically recently.
Very true. The internet and mass media is powerful, much of it is controlled by a relatively small number of people, and is increasingly censored and propagandized. And yet, things are still quite open, many opportunities, channels, and attack vectors are available, for now.
Maybe a better way to put it is politics is an arena where every person can have an opinion that's contrary to what is common, and still have good reasons (even after we look closely) for it being so. We can both believe that the world works in a certain way but have differing views on what to do, simply from having different values.
For example, we can both think that higher taxes harm business, or that higher taxes can be used to equalize opportunities, but have differing views on what is good to do.
I agree, and I think the reason that works, and is necessary, is that only we know our very localized situation (often too intuitively to articulate or to recognize as not applying to everyone else).
The point is not that we all know politics equally well.
Thr point is that, in politics, a credentialed expert doesn't really have any advantage in predictive power over a reasonably well-informed layman.
Statistician and market researcher Jim Manzi made this point roughly ten years ago. It's not a knock against the social sciences either. The point is that you can't generalize in the social sciences the way you can with harder sciences because the causal factors are so complex.
For prediction? No. For understanding (some of) the dynamics of what is going on? Hopefully. That's what much of our discipline is actually aimed at. (Source: am political scientist)
> For prediction? No. For understanding (some of) the dynamics of what is going on? Hopefully.
For some reason, it seems to me that social scientists undersell themselves (why is that? it seems like they almost go along with anti-intellectualism rather than have to deal with the conflict). Understanding the dynamics leads to better predictions and thus better outcomes; it's hard to overlook that mechanism.
Because the systems under study are not isolated external systems that follow well-order rules like a laboratory science. Prediction of human systems is like prediction of weather systems one week ahead: there are ways to model and improve methods for such a task, but our predictive success will continue to be just a little bit better than playing slots.
It would be folly and vain to misunderstand the difficulty of the problem at hand in an effort to signal that one is confident and optimistic. Social science from a century+ ago suffered a lot from folks with that frame of mind, sometimes ending in utter disaster.
A major difficulty is that understanding one part of a complex system does not necessarily lead to testable predictions about the system as a whole. Take elections, for example: we have really good models for voter behaviour under different conditions, so can make good estimates for how, say, a sitting President's votes will vary as a function of employment, or the differential effect of various changes on results in states with different demographics. But what is the electoral consequence (say) of Bill Clinton being impeached? There's no real way to know in advance: individual political scientists will have intuition, but it's too novel a situation with too little existing data for solid model building or prediction. And it turns out that politics is rammed full of new situations, unexpected events, or changes in the environment. How will voting patterns in the South change as a result of GOP realignment after civil rights? What will happen to the British government's popularity when the Queen dies?
A case in point: a couple of years ago I made an HN comment about parliamentary manoeuvring over Brexit and the likely outcomes [0]. I am skilled and knowledgeable about British parliamentary culture and history, many of the subtleties of the Standing Orders (which were suddenly relevant), and had been closely following the proceedings and thinking hard about the implications. I missed the actual outcome completely, by factoring in the possibility of no deal, or of different kinds of compromise, or of the rebels winning a second referendum. But I didn't consider that Johnson could knife Theresa May, supplant her as PM and then successfully sell a clearly defective alternative (and 'harder') deal as a triumph. Even though I knew lots about Conservative politics, and the strengths of populist rhetoric in changing public perceptions. I assumed that if May was deposed her successor would be in the same bind. But Johnson changed the terms of debate unexpectedly successfully and escaped it. My mostly-rationalist colleagues basically missed calling it too.
FWIW I'm big on intellect, but I'm also big on epistemic modesty. There are lots of things we can show are basically true or false (the 'filter bubble' hypothesis for online political information has been basically debunked, for example) but too many unknowns for our mere opinions to be provably correct.
The same is equally or more true of basically everyone else, of course, which is why I find the false certainties of the newspaper opinion pages so depressing.
> Even though I knew lots about ... the strengths of populist rhetoric in changing public perceptions
It seems to me - with no expertise or data beyond reading a lot of public affairs, history, and political science - that from the start almost everyone has had (or put) their heads in the sand about it, that such a response is the norm for insurgent populists (perhaps not unlike the response of the incumbent status quo to disruptive challengers in every field, including IT (think of all the 'disruption', or just Blackberry's response to Apple/Google smartphones)), and that those twin patterns were the biggest threat. And I think that has played out.
AND IT CONTINUES TO PLAY OUT: The competitors to the populists ignore the true political power, the populist reactionary messaging which can sell anything to the public (so far, they can fool enough of the people enough of the time), and try to focus on where they feel safe - legislation. I think they are afraid of the populist rhetoric, and I think people see that they are afraid and ineffectual. I predicted in November and predict now that it will be the downfall of Biden and the Democrats. Nobody votes for ineffectual and afraid - they have nothing to offer - they adjust to where the power lies and the future holds.
Is that just a bunch of BS? (I really did say those things and do think them, but that doesn't rule out a bunch of BS.) And if not, why the heck am I the only one to see the obvious? Is everyone just trying to ignore the disruptive challenger?
I definitely think there's an impedance mismatch between centrist politicians, who believe in Median Voter Theorem[0], a modest policy offer, and a very specific kind of competence; and various kinds of populist disruptive challengers (this latter could be from the left, e.g. Jeremy Corbyn; the right, e.g. Silvio Berlusconi; or the centre, e.g. Beppe Grillo).
The former approach has demonstrably worked for those politicians for decades. Bill Clinton and Blair, for example, were crushingly successful electorally and marginalised their parties' radical wings. So their followers and successors (and lots of political scientists) hold the empirical success of this kind of politics to be proven and obvious.
But the latter has also worked electorally and politically: Berlusconi, M5S, Trump, whatever. And when will they work again in the future? We don't really know. Ross Perot didn't get far in the 90s - how did Trump win? There are lots of theories, but given how few elections you get per year, not enough data. Which environments support which kinds of politics? We have an idea, but not a functioning predictive model.
So people tend to argue for what they personally believe in - which is obviously informed by professional knowledge but shouldn't be confused with science. Many of my colleagues were astonished and shocked by the rise of Corbyn, for example, while I'm more sympathetic to disruptive politics (and critical of the technocratic status quo) and the possibility of something populist breaking open the existing system was obvious to me. That the breakthrough candidate was Corbyn (a long standing politician with no previous evidence of either high competence or desire for leadership) astonished me too.
[0]: MVT is an example of the difficulties of formal modeling in political science. It's provably true within its assumptions (a one-dimensional political spectrum and voters who support the closest candidate) but those assumptions are only weakly true for politics in reality (and the system becomes unstable if the first in particular is false).
Anthony Downs just died. His Median Voter Theorem organises a lot of understanding about political competition. Short version: elections get won in the centre.
That is what has always confused me about "prediction markets".
The reason why non-experts perform as well as experts is because there is a huge level of randomness in actual outcomes, and very little information that can help predict beyond randomness.
And prediction really isn't the goal in practice, but robustness. Even if you were a "superforecaster", you are still going to be wrong most of the time. So surely it is more important to be robust to outcomes and stop trying to predict something that can't be predicted.
(To compare this with large skill gaps to expertise...sports betting, these events are random, some are more random than others but the gap with expert knowledge exists because there is information that exists that will help you predict outcomes. That gap doesn't exist in politics because there is no real information that can help you...it is just totally different, it makes no sense to compare them imo).
Political “science” can help you understand politics, but it can’t endow you with an expert opinion on which policies to implement. Prioritising or selecting policy agendas is largely an exercise in choosing what to value, and there is no scientifically correct perspective on human values.
Also, if you want to implement a democratic process, then the goals of your policies should be to align with what people want, even if you think people want stupid things. All other forms of government are authoritarian, including technocracies run by “experts”.
> Prioritising or selecting policy agendas is largely an exercise in choosing what to value, and there is no scientifically correct perspective on human values.
> the goals of your policies should be to align with what people want, even if you think people want stupid things. All other forms of government are authoritarian, including technocracies run by “experts”.
Great points overall, though I think it shades too much toward making all values and preferences equal and relative. Some values and preferences are superior - that's objectively, philosphically, unprovable, maybe (or maybe not), but we are living and acting in reality. We don't need absolute mathematical proof to make a sound judgment, or we'd all be paralyzed.
Also, providing what people want is complicated. First, many elect you to serve as representative, not mouthpiece. The rep is supposed to spend time figuring out issues and deciding the best course of action - I have my own job to do. In this respect I want the rep to do what I would do if I had all the information.
Second, as any consultant quickly learns, what people say they want now is not what they later remember or say they want, and what they articulate is not exactly what they feel or think. It's your job to deliver what they really want in the appropriate timespan (often in the long term). If I told my client 'I knew this solution would suck but you said you wanted it' they would fire me immediately. It's my job to lead them away from folly; I'm the expert; that's why they pay me.
Finally, people sometimes want evil things. That's why we have universal human rights and limited government - to prevent the majority from doing bad things to the minority. All of us, especially political leaders, have a job to help each other with our human folly.
I think a lot of politicians have this perspective, and I think it’s condescending and anti-democratic.
“People make bad decisions” (according to my own personal judgement of good decision making, of course) is a very week criticism of democracy. Aside from being a subjective assessment to begin with, it is always used as an excuse for some type of authoritarian policy.
In a democracy a politician should be able to articulate their policy agenda, and then be trusted to actually try and implement it. In reality such a process is always going to be mired by errors, and inefficiency, and corruption. But to say “well my politician surely knows what’s best for me, they will protect me from my human folly” is just to excuse the intentional erosion of democratic principles.
I also don’t think universal human rights are a thing that exists in any real form. I don’t believe there is a person anywhere in the world who has a single human right that their government couldn’t deprive them of if it chose to, and I think the perspective your describing is at least partly responsible for that. Governments only ever deprive people of their human rights for reasons they claim are for the benefit of society. The patriot act, and our secret FISA courts, and the laundry list of other tyrannies exist for no reason other than to “protect us”.
It's the foundation of 'democracies', which are representative. Reps can't articulate agendas and carry them out because many issues don't exist when they are elected, most others change, when they get on the job they learn more (hopefully), and they need to work with other people to get anything done (by design). It is a leading job of government, one supported strongly by voters, to protect the public.
The hyperbole and strawpeople aren't relevant. Universal human rights, while not perfect, are far beyond what you describe - including for prisoners.
Understanding how political systems operate and how they’re structured is firmly within the capabilities of political science.
Understanding broad political philosophies can help you better understand any individual policy, and political science can help you understand the types of outcomes a policy is _likely_ to achieve or fail to achieve.
But as a science, it’s not robust enough to make especially reliable predictions, and while understanding mainstream or even fringe political philosophies can be valuable, it is beyond the remit of science to tell you what the “correct” expectations are to have of government and society in general. Because that entirely depends on personal values.
Understanding the structure of government is largely a matter of understanding law and formal procedure. This understanding can be validated by decisions that courts make when resolving controversies relating to that structure.
Validating an understanding of political philosophy cannot be done scientifically, which is the same for all areas of philosophy.
Validating an understanding of the outcomes produced by certain kinds of policy can be approached somewhat scientifically, but you’re never going to derive reliable predictions, or conclusions that are widely agreed upon. Which is the same issue that all scientific research of human behavior encounters, in this case further complicated by the fact that the domain is the entirety of human civilization.
There are also different 'politics' careers or sets of knowledge.
I own a digital agency that does digital marketing/fundraising for Democrats. so my view is there is a ton of knowledge and experiences that are unique to how political campaigns are run.
For sure a lot of knowledge is transferable like if you know how to buy FB ads. (sidenote imho political consultants are way too insular and lag behind what the rest of the digital marketing world does)
But I believe there is unique expertise that one builds up learning through years of working on campaigns. It's a weird blend of science, marketing, and some unquantifiable 'experience.'
Which is BS sometimes for sure.
But an example of experiential expertise is that say you want to make decisions based on data. So you do polling and surveys. But one can write a poll question in a bunch of ways to get pretty different response. Framing and background knowledge is important. though lol now that I wrote this out polling might not be the best example, it's a big can of worms. Pollsters after each election say they learned what was wrong with their weighting/models ex post facto lol.
The Duck of Minerva is a good blog, with contributors who are at the level of full professors at leading universities
https://www.duckofminerva.com/
Political Science Quarterly can be fantastic, though being a quarterly, won't be tackling news from the last 24 hours (but I think we have enough of that).
For a different perspective, the Lowy Interpreter blog at Australian think tank The Lowy Institute, has excellent, expert analysis from a often strikingly different geopolitical point of view:
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter
Other non-partisan think tanks can be a great source. U of Pennsylvania has a ranking of them which, while I wouldn't take verbatim, can provide a good starting point.
I would think it would be a relative scale, whoever are the top x% (by some measure) would by The Experts, by definition. As a terrible analogy, the top 10% of a fruit crop (or whatever) for a given season are "the best", by definition.
It would be lovely if we had a kind of absolute scale to measure by (as is often done in sports and other less complex domains), but that is not possible. However, what is possible (or should be, to some degree) is that (more) people could think from an absolute perspective, which I believe can substantially change how some things appear.
How you would go about doing this though is not obvious, to me.
If that's the argument it's the same with any department in any uni. All those math professors are just citing each other. That Erdos is the worst circle in math!!
No. Maths makes testable predictions, which can be checked with computers in completely deterministic ways using extremely little human judgemnt. The same reality principle applies to the exact sciences and to a lesser extent the social sciences. At some point we leave the social sciences for the humanities where taste is disguised as fact. Not always, and the boundary is unclear but at some point knowledge ends and bullshit begins. If you believe there is no god theology is clearly bullshit. If you don't think white people are indelibly and irredeemably racist then Ibram Kendi is full of shit.
Finance, politics, international relations are more complicated because humans play against humans. As an insight becomes known it becomes useless because humans incorporate it into their models to beat other humans.
But Math clearly has real experise. Ramanujan was recognised on the basis of correspondence. Soros has real expertise in finace. Dominic Cummings managed to run two referendum campaigns that beat UK elite opinion. Kissinger and Bismarck are and were real experts in politics. But they can't demonstrate crushing qualitative superiority like experts in exact sciences can.
> Their only hopes of being taken seriously as an Expert - a position our culture treats as the height of dignity - is to create a complete alternate system of knowledge, ungrounded in any previous system, where they can end up as an expert on the Lizard Papacy.
This is true, but I'm not sure that viewed from the larger perspective this is an unalloyed good. Sure we can do without crackpots. But do we really want the only voices that matter to be those belonging to persons with "PhD" attached to their names?
I am not sure if the article is presenting it as an unalloyed good, but I certainly agree with you.
We need to be thoughtful about how we design "epistemic communities." The current approach centered around normal institutions/academia I think is flawed (although I do think professional scientists are very important).
There is a not a "minor league" version of competing for Nobel in Physics or Chemistry but it also doesn't have to exist as it is not what those people are after. From my POV and experience, what broke down are communities and role of discussion and gossip in those same communities. The popular "Have you heard X about Y" use to apply to a local teacher, major, bar owner ect. and more connection people would find between the X and prominent the figure would be in the community, the more engaged the conversation would have been.
A conversation would go like this Today it's about pop stars, politicians, scientist aka people you (them) will never meet in RL.
I imagine this would be a typical example of conversations that are missing:
Person A: "Have you heard about our major, he is sleeping with the shop owners daughter?"
Person B: "Oh no, really? Doesn't she have a child with the son of the barber?"
Person A: "You mean the barber on the main square?"
Person B: "Yes, that one he use to have more shops but they failed, because barber no.2 screwed him over"
Person A: " That is not what I heard... the story I heard is that barber no1. didn't do his fair share"
Person B: " Come on... that can't justify that..." ECT ECT ECT
This rather long article saying nothing (weird, because I love his other stuff) reinforces my continually growing belief that "general knowledge" is not a particularly clear or useful construct, especially beyond a certain threshhold. (This is also why A.I. is wildly and absurdly overblown.)
There are groups and pockets of people who believe sets of things; some are more robust than others probably because they get tested via skin-in-the-game means.
Addendum. Now that I go back and read it, it was that I remember loving it back when I read it, and offhand for me I'm realizing it was before I discovered Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who does most of what this guy does, but way better; e.g. the basic prinicple of "skin-in-the-game" very easily does the plodding work of "Beware The Man..."
It amuses me to no end to read all these nuanced (dis)agreements, but then miss the obvious connection: HN is exactly one of those proposed intellectual leagues!
A place in which curious people explore and debate their common interests, where you don't have to be an intellectual superstar to participate (although those occasionally show up).
Expertise is not such a cut-and-dry matter. Pretense is more rampant than one would like to admit. And what good does it do you that someone else knows something? It only becomes YOUR knowledge when YOU know it.
In any case, seeking knowledge isn't a race. It's about YOU personally trying to grow in wisdom. You don't read Aristotle because you'll "beat" someone at philosophy. Millions of people have read him before you were even born. You read him so that YOU become a better human person. Our lives are a journey of coming to know the truth, or at least they ought to be, and that means a steady resolution of our initial confusion. This requires the cultivation of virtue because vice corrupts motives and moves them away from the steadfast pursuit of truth toward lesser things in an improper way.
Life isn't about measuring dicks. It's about happiness which is about becoming more fully what you are as an individual human being. Is the life of a simple carpenter who does the best he can worthless because he isn't Michelangelo?
So get rid of your pride and the need to be special and you will be set free from countless miseries. Compared to infinity, all dicks are small and only the prideful man would fall into despair over that realization. He wants fame or adulation from everyone. Focus on your own life and the world around you. Be the salt of the earth to those around you and profit from their good. Stop chasing illusions.
> ... what's the intellectual equivalent of the minor leagues?
It's called bar trivia and it's awesome! I'm not a super smart dude, but I love going to a bar trivia and seeing what I get right (despite never having watched the show, I guessed that the motor home in The Walking Dead was a Winnebago) and what I frustratingly get wrong (despite being a huge fan of pop-punk music, I couldn't remember the title to Green Day's hit song Basket Case).
> Their only hopes of being taken seriously as an Expert - a position our culture treats as the height of dignity - is to create a complete alternate system of knowledge, ungrounded in any previous system, where they can end up as an expert on the Lizard Papacy.
I couldn't help but notice the resemblance with how postmodernism and critical theory and their derivatives have infiltrated Academia.
> It's the feeling that you have something to contribute to the great project of figuring out the secret structure of the world, and that other people in a shared community of knowledge-seeking will appreciate you for it.
QAnon exists, in part, because of the metaverse. The metaverse can be viewed as some augmented reality version of of the real world. Conversations and ideas that foment and thrive in the metaverse eventually make their way back to reality. You can (mostly) thank Facebook for that...
I disagree with several of the premises of the article.
There are lots of interesting things to learn that are well within the intellectual horsepower of average people, esp if you give people a short primer or refresher on experiment design. For example, there is a guy “Project Farm” on YouTube that does practical experiments to see which hand tool is better. Are his experiments rigorous enough for a scientific journal? Probably not, but he’s transparent about the design and conduct of his experiments and develops useful information in an entertaining way.
Put another way, just as there are precious few people to lead the NBA in scoring or discover the Higgs boson, doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for the rest of us to do our own corresponding modest things.
For every person who patents a process for the economical industrial scale production of graphene there are scores of relatively normal people who invent practical stuff like wrenches and paper clips.
If I have convinced you that this premise is wrong, then the argument against QAnon falls apart, as the argument posits that the only way for normies to get their intellectual itch scratched is to invent conspiracies.
Personally I think the argument is wrong for other reasons: I’ve met some QAnon people and there are way more consumers than producers; it appears that QAnon is not only or even primarily about “solving” the conspiracy.
My opinion is that QAnon is about as serious as anything else that emerged from 4Chan and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was an elaborate hoax with some giggly drunk people writing posts now and then.
The people I know who subscribe to QAnon theories are people who feel powerless but desperately want there to exist a “5th column” who will take down the tyrannical forces of evil that they perceive but don’t know how to effectively fight. They really do believe that the generals are about to March in and arrest Biden for (insert latest crazy legal theory here) and re-install Trump. It’s a form of political fantasy.
QAnon exists for the same reason Alex Jones exists. Sensation sells. You can still be an (entirely rational) "prepper" if you want to be. Yet, it's routinely associated with right-wing extremism and delegitimized as a movement. By the same token, you can probably try to be an independent, investigative journalist even if you are bound to not survive scrutiny, especially if you let foundational research practices and sourcing slip.
I often here the analogy to sports when it comes to expertise. And if it often applies, but not always.
Epistemology is simply the study of "the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues." [1]
We all do epistemology, all the time, whether we choose to think about it or not. In sports, we have minor leagues, where the stakes are lower. As the political climate (and the unfortunate affect of things like QAnon) demonstrates, the stakes aren't always lower just because epistemology is done poorly.
Something similar can be said of rhetoric. I applaud this article for not falling a trap we have also seen too often recently, the Appeal to Authority [2]. The author judges someone else's argument solely on the merits, rather than that person's background. To steal the original authors metaphor: Babe Ruth still had to go up to the plate and take a swing. Babe Ruth was an expert baseball player because he hit a lot of home runs. It would bizarre if the opposite were true - that is, if Babe Ruth was given a lot of home runs because he was an expert. And yet, we have experts that try to dismiss plausible (perhaps likely, perhaps unlikely, but nevertheless plausible) scenarios without any explanation as to why they choose to do that. [3][4] And it is incumbent of all of us in a free society to be able to read something presented to us and realize, though we may not be experts, even if the conclusion is right, the argument along the way isn't.
> My point is we're all engaged in this kind of desperate project of trying to feel like we're having new important insights, in a world full of people who are much smarter than we are... Partly this is all for the greater good... I would argue "intellectual exercise" is a better term.
I've come to the conclusion that even if it's not read by many people, public professions are still valuable. As an American who is generally more "conservative" but also finds Trump abhorrent, I wish I had written more random internet posts in the summer of 2015 about how, even from a traditional conservative perspective, Trump is terrible, for the World, for the US, and for Conservatism. Perhaps it would have changed a few people's minds. Maybe it wouldn't have changed anyone's minds, but planted a seed of doubt in people's blind faith for that man. I'm a complete amateur when it comes to all the relevant subjects. Yet, it still seems like it would have been a good thing to do.
Perhaps the alternative is that if you know anything abrasive will be ignored or derailed by others then you’ll automatically not share knowledge and then you don’t learn.
If people who are intelligent can’t handle ideas that aren’t “palatable” to them, what’s the fucking purpose of your academy? lol.
It’s like asking atheists to care about your church’s rules. You’re just stupid for not understanding that they aren’t participating with you any longer.
There are experts, but things are so politicized that everyone dislikes them (the acts don't agree with anyone's partisan position) and reads what is appealing. I think that was the OP's point, but it's a dangerous notion to think we all know politics roughly equally well.
Political science can be highly informative and predictive, as can research in adjacent fields such as international relations. It transforms my understanding of what others are saying (with partisans being reliably absurd).
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691178288/ex...
Of course, university isn't reality. But my point is that people do not find realistic opinions that interesting. Saying "I don't know" or "both sides have merit" is sometimes accurate but never interesting. Society selects for this.
I also worked in finance which exposes you to a reasonably fast feedback loop between opinion and reality. I met people who had multi-decade records of crushing it, and they usually had very anodyne takes. You come in expecting they have access to some higher form of truth...in reality, they are just better at seeing what is already there.
You see this, particularly, when a famed investor says the market is over-valued. Inevitably, they will get lambasted publicly. But you realise that their view is usually one that works long-term, that is quantifiable, that uses reason...everyone else just wants emotion.
The difference isn't knowledge. You can have huge knowledge, you can be rewarded heavily for being right, you can be a media "expert"...but if you aren't interested in reality, it doesn't matter.
I don't think it is about avoiding having strong views either but it has to be strong views, weakly held. With time I think a minority of the population realises that some people will have the same opinion regardless of what facts are presented to them. What is frustrating is that society reproduces so much of this nonsense.
I am intrigued by prediction markets as a way to give feedback to people's models of reality and how accurate they are in extrapolating trends, and to reward those who are better able to predict the future. It's a potential way to introduce 'skin in the game', both from a reputational and financial perspective.
Is that 'media expert' claiming Country X will be a dictatorship in 2 years because their political opposition won an election? Define terms and ask them to make a bet, and let's see how that plays out.
After awhile, you can start to see people's track records, and the skin in the game pressure may incentivize better epistemics before making claims.
I probably agree with your aims. I think that systems should exist to make better decisions but there is limit because no-one can make perfect decisions (and it is probably more important to consider robustness at that point). I think attempting to reward predictions makes no sense, everyone is prone to these biases. I don't think rewarding a certain group of people makes that any better.
One part of markets that people often get wrong is that sometimes markets are totally wrong. With Enron, the information that the company was fraudulent was publicly available, and relatively easy to find. But the price for the stock was set by people who didn't want to find it. Mayweather vs McGregor...crazy odds. In 2012, the US prediction market Intrade had wildly inaccurate odds for the Presidential election, this was a market that was trading hundreds of thousands per day. Markets work most of the time, they don't work all the time (I would say financial markets are the best evidence of this, you see stuff that makes no sense almost all the time because investors have such different aims...you think no-one is this stupid, then you see it happen in a megacap stock worth hundreds of billions, and your perspective on human reasoning changes significantly).
I also don't think solutions/tools should be discarded because they are not perfect.
From your examples, it seems like your knock against prediction markets are the fact the aggregated predictions don't end being correct at times? Of course that's going to happen, and I don't necessary see instances of the wrong aggregated predictions of a market as a bug, but a feature. Human populations are wrong about things all the time in the aggregate. What better way to get better at decision-making than getting feedback on how we are wrong?
My argument for prediction markets was not for generating knowledge in the aggregate from all of the individual users' predictions. It was centered on the individual front as a way to reward individuals who are better able to predict the future. The uber context in which I was commenting was around who should be considered an expert. Prediction markets are one potential tool (albeit not perfect) to measure individual's conception of current reality and future reality.
Rewarding individuals? So we swap one set of "experts" for another? The point of this is that no-one is an expert. The problems are created not because we don't have prediction markets, but because we treat "experts" with reverence.
The comment about randomness you made to another reply...with any event, there is some part of the outcome that is unpredictable. You could have perfect information, and still would be unable to predict it every time. Some events have no information that can be used to predict them, so predicting is just the event's previous frequency or last value.
Creating an artificial prediction market is more like gambling where people are transferring risk for its own sake. Nothing wrong with that but I am not sure what the purpose would be. As said, these markets are also unlikely to add any new information either because the kind of events being talked about some largely random.
Agreed.
Would it be fair to say that there is some value, but the quantity is unknown?
> Creating an artificial prediction market is more like gambling where people are transferring risk for its own sake.
I suppose this is part of what is involved, but "transferring risk for its own sake" doesn't seem like a comprehensive description of what they are.
> Nothing wrong with that but I am not sure what the purpose would be.
I think it's useful to always consider that there may be more to see than what catches one's eye.
> As said, these markets are also unlikely to add any new information either because the kind of events being talked about some largely random.
If I rephrase this to:
>> Because [the kind of events being talked about are largely random] it logically follows that [these markets are unlikely to add any new information].
...it seems to me that this is an imperfect way of thinking about it. Perhaps I have mischaracterized your intended meaning?
> Saying "I don't know" or "both sides have merit" is sometimes accurate but never interesting.
That's fine but IMHO the real work is to go beyond that, to the next step. Find a solution, make a contribution, under that condition.
I think this is the difference between how humans reason emotionally and how humans reason logically.
Finance is a bad example because most people lose it when money is involved. But you see this in other areas where it is very hard to make a contribution if that contribution isn't surprising, controversial, or shocking in some way. It has to have emotional valence. This isn't universal. Some areas of study don't have that culture, some organizations have clear decision-making processes that try to stop this...but everyone is prone to emotional reasoning.
I completely agree with you, and "Society selects for this" is a decent explanation (I would add in culture) - but isn't it strange that there seem to be so few outliers? And I'm not talking about disinterested centrists, but more like people who are interested in the meta aspect, the fact that approximately no one is interested in what is actually true (that they do not know, that both sides typically do have some merit), especially when compared to how people really are (they do not know that they do not know, they (commonly) cannot realize or even consider the possibility that each side usually has some valid points....rather, a very common phrase I hear nowadays is "I've had enough of this 'both sides!'").
Isn't it strange that this is the nature of the system that we live in, and isn't it even stranger that hardly anyone seems to find it odd?
> What is frustrating is that society reproduces so much of this nonsense.
It's frustrating for sure, but if you think about it: why wouldn't it produce nonsense? Like, we've been having these sorts of issues for decades - we see more of it (and I suspect more exists) because of the internet, but we haven't really changed much about the way we do things (if anything, any new tool we get is used to crank the insanity even higher), so does it make sense to expect it to improve over time?
I think you can find plenty of that kind of discussion the academic/professional sphere, though it's small in proportion to the greatly increased radicalized chatter. That's part of the point of radicalization and propaganda - to politicize everything, to the point where there is no truth, just partisan claims and suspicion. They are doing an effective job, but we don't have to go along with it - I simply refuse to read the partisan stuff; there is plenty to read, especially from the entirety of human history before the last several years.
> we've been having these sorts of issues for decades
Polarization and, IIRC, radicalization, have increased dramatically recently.
Agree. You can find "plenty", of a certain quality (but how high?) Compare this to the activity and quality of discussion in the history of philosophy though, an academic undertaking that seems to have taken a seat at the kids table in modern times.
> That's part of the point of radicalization and propaganda - to politicize everything, to the point where there is no truth, just partisan claims and suspicion.
I firmly believe that much of what you are referring to is to a large degree consciously ~engineered. But also at the same time, I think we should be extremely mindful of emergence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
> They are doing an effective job, but we don't have to go along with it - I simply refuse to read the partisan stuff; there is plenty to read, especially from the entirety of human history before the last several years.
I prefer reading some of it on an ongoing basis and studying its nature, the ~techniques, the effects, how it alters the perception of the public, etc. Study it as a system, understand how it works, why things are the way they are, how it can be influenced, etc.
> Polarization and, IIRC, radicalization, have increased dramatically recently.
Very true. The internet and mass media is powerful, much of it is controlled by a relatively small number of people, and is increasingly censored and propagandized. And yet, things are still quite open, many opportunities, channels, and attack vectors are available, for now.
For example, we can both think that higher taxes harm business, or that higher taxes can be used to equalize opportunities, but have differing views on what is good to do.
Thr point is that, in politics, a credentialed expert doesn't really have any advantage in predictive power over a reasonably well-informed layman.
Statistician and market researcher Jim Manzi made this point roughly ten years ago. It's not a knock against the social sciences either. The point is that you can't generalize in the social sciences the way you can with harder sciences because the causal factors are so complex.
Cool! Any recommendations (beyond what I listed below)?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29031783
> For prediction? No. For understanding (some of) the dynamics of what is going on? Hopefully.
For some reason, it seems to me that social scientists undersell themselves (why is that? it seems like they almost go along with anti-intellectualism rather than have to deal with the conflict). Understanding the dynamics leads to better predictions and thus better outcomes; it's hard to overlook that mechanism.
It would be folly and vain to misunderstand the difficulty of the problem at hand in an effort to signal that one is confident and optimistic. Social science from a century+ ago suffered a lot from folks with that frame of mind, sometimes ending in utter disaster.
A case in point: a couple of years ago I made an HN comment about parliamentary manoeuvring over Brexit and the likely outcomes [0]. I am skilled and knowledgeable about British parliamentary culture and history, many of the subtleties of the Standing Orders (which were suddenly relevant), and had been closely following the proceedings and thinking hard about the implications. I missed the actual outcome completely, by factoring in the possibility of no deal, or of different kinds of compromise, or of the rebels winning a second referendum. But I didn't consider that Johnson could knife Theresa May, supplant her as PM and then successfully sell a clearly defective alternative (and 'harder') deal as a triumph. Even though I knew lots about Conservative politics, and the strengths of populist rhetoric in changing public perceptions. I assumed that if May was deposed her successor would be in the same bind. But Johnson changed the terms of debate unexpectedly successfully and escaped it. My mostly-rationalist colleagues basically missed calling it too.
FWIW I'm big on intellect, but I'm also big on epistemic modesty. There are lots of things we can show are basically true or false (the 'filter bubble' hypothesis for online political information has been basically debunked, for example) but too many unknowns for our mere opinions to be provably correct.
The same is equally or more true of basically everyone else, of course, which is why I find the false certainties of the newspaper opinion pages so depressing.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19372349
> Even though I knew lots about ... the strengths of populist rhetoric in changing public perceptions
It seems to me - with no expertise or data beyond reading a lot of public affairs, history, and political science - that from the start almost everyone has had (or put) their heads in the sand about it, that such a response is the norm for insurgent populists (perhaps not unlike the response of the incumbent status quo to disruptive challengers in every field, including IT (think of all the 'disruption', or just Blackberry's response to Apple/Google smartphones)), and that those twin patterns were the biggest threat. And I think that has played out.
AND IT CONTINUES TO PLAY OUT: The competitors to the populists ignore the true political power, the populist reactionary messaging which can sell anything to the public (so far, they can fool enough of the people enough of the time), and try to focus on where they feel safe - legislation. I think they are afraid of the populist rhetoric, and I think people see that they are afraid and ineffectual. I predicted in November and predict now that it will be the downfall of Biden and the Democrats. Nobody votes for ineffectual and afraid - they have nothing to offer - they adjust to where the power lies and the future holds.
Is that just a bunch of BS? (I really did say those things and do think them, but that doesn't rule out a bunch of BS.) And if not, why the heck am I the only one to see the obvious? Is everyone just trying to ignore the disruptive challenger?
The former approach has demonstrably worked for those politicians for decades. Bill Clinton and Blair, for example, were crushingly successful electorally and marginalised their parties' radical wings. So their followers and successors (and lots of political scientists) hold the empirical success of this kind of politics to be proven and obvious.
But the latter has also worked electorally and politically: Berlusconi, M5S, Trump, whatever. And when will they work again in the future? We don't really know. Ross Perot didn't get far in the 90s - how did Trump win? There are lots of theories, but given how few elections you get per year, not enough data. Which environments support which kinds of politics? We have an idea, but not a functioning predictive model.
So people tend to argue for what they personally believe in - which is obviously informed by professional knowledge but shouldn't be confused with science. Many of my colleagues were astonished and shocked by the rise of Corbyn, for example, while I'm more sympathetic to disruptive politics (and critical of the technocratic status quo) and the possibility of something populist breaking open the existing system was obvious to me. That the breakthrough candidate was Corbyn (a long standing politician with no previous evidence of either high competence or desire for leadership) astonished me too.
[0]: MVT is an example of the difficulties of formal modeling in political science. It's provably true within its assumptions (a one-dimensional political spectrum and voters who support the closest candidate) but those assumptions are only weakly true for politics in reality (and the system becomes unstable if the first in particular is false).
The reason why non-experts perform as well as experts is because there is a huge level of randomness in actual outcomes, and very little information that can help predict beyond randomness.
And prediction really isn't the goal in practice, but robustness. Even if you were a "superforecaster", you are still going to be wrong most of the time. So surely it is more important to be robust to outcomes and stop trying to predict something that can't be predicted.
(To compare this with large skill gaps to expertise...sports betting, these events are random, some are more random than others but the gap with expert knowledge exists because there is information that exists that will help you predict outcomes. That gap doesn't exist in politics because there is no real information that can help you...it is just totally different, it makes no sense to compare them imo).
When you use the term 'random' or 'randomness', are you using that as a synonym for 'complexity that is difficult to understand'? Or something else?
Also, if you want to implement a democratic process, then the goals of your policies should be to align with what people want, even if you think people want stupid things. All other forms of government are authoritarian, including technocracies run by “experts”.
> the goals of your policies should be to align with what people want, even if you think people want stupid things. All other forms of government are authoritarian, including technocracies run by “experts”.
Great points overall, though I think it shades too much toward making all values and preferences equal and relative. Some values and preferences are superior - that's objectively, philosphically, unprovable, maybe (or maybe not), but we are living and acting in reality. We don't need absolute mathematical proof to make a sound judgment, or we'd all be paralyzed.
Also, providing what people want is complicated. First, many elect you to serve as representative, not mouthpiece. The rep is supposed to spend time figuring out issues and deciding the best course of action - I have my own job to do. In this respect I want the rep to do what I would do if I had all the information.
Second, as any consultant quickly learns, what people say they want now is not what they later remember or say they want, and what they articulate is not exactly what they feel or think. It's your job to deliver what they really want in the appropriate timespan (often in the long term). If I told my client 'I knew this solution would suck but you said you wanted it' they would fire me immediately. It's my job to lead them away from folly; I'm the expert; that's why they pay me.
Finally, people sometimes want evil things. That's why we have universal human rights and limited government - to prevent the majority from doing bad things to the minority. All of us, especially political leaders, have a job to help each other with our human folly.
“People make bad decisions” (according to my own personal judgement of good decision making, of course) is a very week criticism of democracy. Aside from being a subjective assessment to begin with, it is always used as an excuse for some type of authoritarian policy.
In a democracy a politician should be able to articulate their policy agenda, and then be trusted to actually try and implement it. In reality such a process is always going to be mired by errors, and inefficiency, and corruption. But to say “well my politician surely knows what’s best for me, they will protect me from my human folly” is just to excuse the intentional erosion of democratic principles.
I also don’t think universal human rights are a thing that exists in any real form. I don’t believe there is a person anywhere in the world who has a single human right that their government couldn’t deprive them of if it chose to, and I think the perspective your describing is at least partly responsible for that. Governments only ever deprive people of their human rights for reasons they claim are for the benefit of society. The patriot act, and our secret FISA courts, and the laundry list of other tyrannies exist for no reason other than to “protect us”.
The hyperbole and strawpeople aren't relevant. Universal human rights, while not perfect, are far beyond what you describe - including for prisoners.
In what sense does it help you understand? Is it just that you can tell a story(non-predictive) about what has happened?
Understanding broad political philosophies can help you better understand any individual policy, and political science can help you understand the types of outcomes a policy is _likely_ to achieve or fail to achieve.
But as a science, it’s not robust enough to make especially reliable predictions, and while understanding mainstream or even fringe political philosophies can be valuable, it is beyond the remit of science to tell you what the “correct” expectations are to have of government and society in general. Because that entirely depends on personal values.
Validating an understanding of political philosophy cannot be done scientifically, which is the same for all areas of philosophy.
Validating an understanding of the outcomes produced by certain kinds of policy can be approached somewhat scientifically, but you’re never going to derive reliable predictions, or conclusions that are widely agreed upon. Which is the same issue that all scientific research of human behavior encounters, in this case further complicated by the fact that the domain is the entirety of human civilization.
I own a digital agency that does digital marketing/fundraising for Democrats. so my view is there is a ton of knowledge and experiences that are unique to how political campaigns are run.
For sure a lot of knowledge is transferable like if you know how to buy FB ads. (sidenote imho political consultants are way too insular and lag behind what the rest of the digital marketing world does)
But I believe there is unique expertise that one builds up learning through years of working on campaigns. It's a weird blend of science, marketing, and some unquantifiable 'experience.'
Which is BS sometimes for sure.
But an example of experiential expertise is that say you want to make decisions based on data. So you do polling and surveys. But one can write a poll question in a bunch of ways to get pretty different response. Framing and background knowledge is important. though lol now that I wrote this out polling might not be the best example, it's a big can of worms. Pollsters after each election say they learned what was wrong with their weighting/models ex post facto lol.
The Duck of Minerva is a good blog, with contributors who are at the level of full professors at leading universities https://www.duckofminerva.com/
Political Science Quarterly can be fantastic, though being a quarterly, won't be tackling news from the last 24 hours (but I think we have enough of that).
For a different perspective, the Lowy Interpreter blog at Australian think tank The Lowy Institute, has excellent, expert analysis from a often strikingly different geopolitical point of view: https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter
Other non-partisan think tanks can be a great source. U of Pennsylvania has a ranking of them which, while I wouldn't take verbatim, can provide a good starting point.
It looks like some of this is that they are professors, or they cite each other, which is rather circular.
Are there testable predictions, or some utility to those who aren't political scientists?
It would be lovely if we had a kind of absolute scale to measure by (as is often done in sports and other less complex domains), but that is not possible. However, what is possible (or should be, to some degree) is that (more) people could think from an absolute perspective, which I believe can substantially change how some things appear.
How you would go about doing this though is not obvious, to me.
Finance, politics, international relations are more complicated because humans play against humans. As an insight becomes known it becomes useless because humans incorporate it into their models to beat other humans.
But Math clearly has real experise. Ramanujan was recognised on the basis of correspondence. Soros has real expertise in finace. Dominic Cummings managed to run two referendum campaigns that beat UK elite opinion. Kissinger and Bismarck are and were real experts in politics. But they can't demonstrate crushing qualitative superiority like experts in exact sciences can.
This is true, but I'm not sure that viewed from the larger perspective this is an unalloyed good. Sure we can do without crackpots. But do we really want the only voices that matter to be those belonging to persons with "PhD" attached to their names?
We need to be thoughtful about how we design "epistemic communities." The current approach centered around normal institutions/academia I think is flawed (although I do think professional scientists are very important).
You can look at some philosophers of science who have thinking very much along these lines, ie. https://www.liamkofibright.com/research.html
There is a not a "minor league" version of competing for Nobel in Physics or Chemistry but it also doesn't have to exist as it is not what those people are after. From my POV and experience, what broke down are communities and role of discussion and gossip in those same communities. The popular "Have you heard X about Y" use to apply to a local teacher, major, bar owner ect. and more connection people would find between the X and prominent the figure would be in the community, the more engaged the conversation would have been. A conversation would go like this Today it's about pop stars, politicians, scientist aka people you (them) will never meet in RL.
I imagine this would be a typical example of conversations that are missing:
Person A: "Have you heard about our major, he is sleeping with the shop owners daughter?" Person B: "Oh no, really? Doesn't she have a child with the son of the barber?" Person A: "You mean the barber on the main square?" Person B: "Yes, that one he use to have more shops but they failed, because barber no.2 screwed him over" Person A: " That is not what I heard... the story I heard is that barber no1. didn't do his fair share" Person B: " Come on... that can't justify that..." ECT ECT ECT
There are groups and pockets of people who believe sets of things; some are more robust than others probably because they get tested via skin-in-the-game means.
Mind an example? I'm curious, because I so far have not been blown away by the writing of the rationalist-adjacent subcommunity.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
"Top 10":
https://slatestarcodex.com/about/
All the ones listed here are pretty good too:
https://slatestarcodex.com/about/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...
A place in which curious people explore and debate their common interests, where you don't have to be an intellectual superstar to participate (although those occasionally show up).
In any case, seeking knowledge isn't a race. It's about YOU personally trying to grow in wisdom. You don't read Aristotle because you'll "beat" someone at philosophy. Millions of people have read him before you were even born. You read him so that YOU become a better human person. Our lives are a journey of coming to know the truth, or at least they ought to be, and that means a steady resolution of our initial confusion. This requires the cultivation of virtue because vice corrupts motives and moves them away from the steadfast pursuit of truth toward lesser things in an improper way.
Life isn't about measuring dicks. It's about happiness which is about becoming more fully what you are as an individual human being. Is the life of a simple carpenter who does the best he can worthless because he isn't Michelangelo?
So get rid of your pride and the need to be special and you will be set free from countless miseries. Compared to infinity, all dicks are small and only the prideful man would fall into despair over that realization. He wants fame or adulation from everyone. Focus on your own life and the world around you. Be the salt of the earth to those around you and profit from their good. Stop chasing illusions.
Wisdom for the ages.
It's called bar trivia and it's awesome! I'm not a super smart dude, but I love going to a bar trivia and seeing what I get right (despite never having watched the show, I guessed that the motor home in The Walking Dead was a Winnebago) and what I frustratingly get wrong (despite being a huge fan of pop-punk music, I couldn't remember the title to Green Day's hit song Basket Case).
I couldn't help but notice the resemblance with how postmodernism and critical theory and their derivatives have infiltrated Academia.
Cracked me up. Visions of minor league math competitions, etc.
QAnon exists, in part, because of the metaverse. The metaverse can be viewed as some augmented reality version of of the real world. Conversations and ideas that foment and thrive in the metaverse eventually make their way back to reality. You can (mostly) thank Facebook for that...
There are lots of interesting things to learn that are well within the intellectual horsepower of average people, esp if you give people a short primer or refresher on experiment design. For example, there is a guy “Project Farm” on YouTube that does practical experiments to see which hand tool is better. Are his experiments rigorous enough for a scientific journal? Probably not, but he’s transparent about the design and conduct of his experiments and develops useful information in an entertaining way.
Put another way, just as there are precious few people to lead the NBA in scoring or discover the Higgs boson, doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for the rest of us to do our own corresponding modest things.
For every person who patents a process for the economical industrial scale production of graphene there are scores of relatively normal people who invent practical stuff like wrenches and paper clips.
If I have convinced you that this premise is wrong, then the argument against QAnon falls apart, as the argument posits that the only way for normies to get their intellectual itch scratched is to invent conspiracies.
Personally I think the argument is wrong for other reasons: I’ve met some QAnon people and there are way more consumers than producers; it appears that QAnon is not only or even primarily about “solving” the conspiracy.
My opinion is that QAnon is about as serious as anything else that emerged from 4Chan and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was an elaborate hoax with some giggly drunk people writing posts now and then.
The people I know who subscribe to QAnon theories are people who feel powerless but desperately want there to exist a “5th column” who will take down the tyrannical forces of evil that they perceive but don’t know how to effectively fight. They really do believe that the generals are about to March in and arrest Biden for (insert latest crazy legal theory here) and re-install Trump. It’s a form of political fantasy.
Epistemology is simply the study of "the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues." [1] We all do epistemology, all the time, whether we choose to think about it or not. In sports, we have minor leagues, where the stakes are lower. As the political climate (and the unfortunate affect of things like QAnon) demonstrates, the stakes aren't always lower just because epistemology is done poorly.
Something similar can be said of rhetoric. I applaud this article for not falling a trap we have also seen too often recently, the Appeal to Authority [2]. The author judges someone else's argument solely on the merits, rather than that person's background. To steal the original authors metaphor: Babe Ruth still had to go up to the plate and take a swing. Babe Ruth was an expert baseball player because he hit a lot of home runs. It would bizarre if the opposite were true - that is, if Babe Ruth was given a lot of home runs because he was an expert. And yet, we have experts that try to dismiss plausible (perhaps likely, perhaps unlikely, but nevertheless plausible) scenarios without any explanation as to why they choose to do that. [3][4] And it is incumbent of all of us in a free society to be able to read something presented to us and realize, though we may not be experts, even if the conclusion is right, the argument along the way isn't.
> My point is we're all engaged in this kind of desperate project of trying to feel like we're having new important insights, in a world full of people who are much smarter than we are... Partly this is all for the greater good... I would argue "intellectual exercise" is a better term.
I've come to the conclusion that even if it's not read by many people, public professions are still valuable. As an American who is generally more "conservative" but also finds Trump abhorrent, I wish I had written more random internet posts in the summer of 2015 about how, even from a traditional conservative perspective, Trump is terrible, for the World, for the US, and for Conservatism. Perhaps it would have changed a few people's minds. Maybe it wouldn't have changed anyone's minds, but planted a seed of doubt in people's blind faith for that man. I'm a complete amateur when it comes to all the relevant subjects. Yet, it still seems like it would have been a good thing to do.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority 3. https://apnews.com/article/who-report-animals-source-covid-1... 4. https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-world-news-health-scien...
If people who are intelligent can’t handle ideas that aren’t “palatable” to them, what’s the fucking purpose of your academy? lol. It’s like asking atheists to care about your church’s rules. You’re just stupid for not understanding that they aren’t participating with you any longer.