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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

The Monkey Cage column at the Washington Post is written by political scientists (generally, afaik), and will reference others. https://www.washingtonpost.com/monkey-cage/

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.

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What makes these people experts?

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?

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.

I don't understand the question: You don't understand what qualifies them as experts? Look at their bios.

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