Comment by toofy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toofy | Hacker News Reader

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> ...the real point is that it's irrelevant how well or poorly we judge those people. What matters is the facts they or others present.

This matters if your expertise are in the subject to which the facts belong, otherwise it means little, particularly in a subject which requires an incredible amount of knowledge of an an incredible array of subjects.

I can look a bunch of absolute facts regarding 5g signals and make an assumption, however, because my expertise lie far outside the realm of 5g, an expert can easily come along afterwards and show me why these facts–while accurate–mean nothing to the subject at hand and why a completely different set of facts are what one should be looking at.

Expertise absolutely matters. And this is coming from a person who is confident that a greater than zero amount of companies would happily pay people to add noise to a topic in order to poison us for a fraction of a percentage boost in their quarterly growth.

Expertise matters on complex subjects and attempting to pretend as if all ideas are equal no matter who they come from or who receives them is a recipe for disaster.

The collective We really need to get back to a place where we freely and happily say “It’s really outside my realm of expertise. You should track down an expert.” and way more often daily and regularly “I don’t know.”

> as if all ideas

This isn't about ideas. It's about data. The quality of data is independent of where it came from, so it actually is equal in that sense.

> You should track down an expert.

Yes, we should refer people to experts more often. Why? Because they have data, not because they have titles or affiliations. Information is what makes them experts, and information can be shared.

I can think of very few science cranks I've ever seen who didn't have some kind of data. That means nothing. Data isn't a magical, pure, and perfect substance that emerges from the aether.

Data doesn't speak for itself. It has to be properly contextualized and positioned for an intended audience and message. It's for that reason that you don't ever see scientific papers that are just tables of numbers alone.

If you're outside a particular area of expertise, the intellectually honest thing to do is to say "I'm not knowledgeable enough to assess these findings" and defer to someone who is. At that point, you're assessing credibility, and affiliation and track record absolutely matter.

> It has to be properly contextualized and positioned

Contextualization and positioning are themselves information that an expert can pass on.

Perhaps I should have been more clear, apologies if I assumed it would be inferred.

To use your term data, with complex topics it isn’t simply having data. One must know which data is relevant to consider for which topic at which point. And even more importantly, one must understand which missing sets of information need to be considered.

There is a reason our society has come to place such a high value on experience and expertise. And it isn’t solely because someone had books of data stored on massive bookshelves. While these bookshelves are important, it is their understanding in the nuances of which books to hunt for answers.

Our new ability to store significantly more of these books and retrieve them more efficiently doesn’t remove our need for someone to use and contextualize the information contained in these books. New tech doesn’t change the fact that expertise matters.

Interestingly enough, we now face a sort of reverse of the problems we’ve faced for centuries: While we used to struggle to find enough information to feed to experts, now we face too much data and not enough experts to properly make use of it.

Again, apologies if my first post wasn’t clarifying enough.

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