Experts from a world that no longer exists

My uncles pension scheme was structured to pay out 1.5% of his final salary, inflation adjusted for the rest of his life, for each year he'd worked. He worked at one company his whole career, from age 18 to age 55, when he retired. Factoring in his mortgage, which he paid off prior to retirement, his disposable income never even dropped when he retired.

Exact figures don't matter too much, but to achieve that with a defined-contribution pension you need to invest something in the range of 15%+ of your gross salary for 30 years and achieve a 7% above-inflation annualized investment return. And it won't be final salary but career average.

Most people aren't doing this so are fucked

It kept climbing from November 1998 until the dot-com crash started in spring 2000. By Jan 2003 it hit 29.59 on the way down and went down to 17.46 in April 2007.

Then the subprime boom started really going and it climbed to 27.58 by July 2008, hitting 122.39 in May 2009. By October 2009 it was back down to 20.33 and by September 2011 it was down to 13.01.

Then it started its climb again. It was at 22.04 October 2019, before they were talking about Covid even in Wuhan. It hit 39.26 in December 2020 and is now back down to 29.59.

As the poster says, in 1999 and 2000 and in 2007 and 2008 we were hearing about how we were in a new paradigm unmoored from the old reality and so forth. At the end of the day, the economy always came crashing back to earth. In October 1999, the book Dow 36,000 was published echoing a lot of this sentiment. The Dow was 10336 the day before the book came out, then it went down to 7591 by September 2002. In February 2009 it was at 7062. We just finally hit 36,000 DJIA this month (before going down again).

This is what I think more people should be paying attention to. I keep seeing the FIRE(financially independent; retire early) people talk about the returns they have gotten the past 100 years, not taking into account that the first 50 of those years saw tremendous growth, and the last of those 50 years saw tremendous stagnation and debt that doesn't seem sustainable.

The world's first billionaire was Rockefeller in the early 1900's. By 1970 the world's richest man was Hughes, who had amassed a fortune of $2.5 billion. In 70 years the number doubled. Since then in the next 50 years the world's richest man is now Musk, with a wealth 100x that of Hughes at $290 billion. In 1970 the minimum wage was $1.70 compared to today's $7.25, an increase of 4.2x. 100x vs 4.2x.

When you extrapolate that growth out another 50 years, the world's richest man ends up at $25 trillion. Minimum wage would grow to $30/hour. Another 50 years further, $2.5 Quadrillion, minimum wage is now $125/hour.

It's ludicrous. Have we been boiling frogs the past 50 years? If the wealthy at those price levels tried to sell even 1% of their wealth/year the system would crash. So it's clear from my standpoint that those growth levels will simply not happen. How does it break? Does it break with minimum wage growth? Does it break with everything going to 0? Something else happens?

What happens when interest rates are unable to fall further? Are we already at the end of the ball? How much higher can it go?

> "There's this notion that low interest rates justify high valuations. You have to understand what people are saying there. So let's say that I've got a security that is going to pay $100 a decade from now. And I want to get, let's say, a 6% annual return. I can say well, for that return, I would pay $55.80 for that.

> Now if I'm willing to get a return of only 2% annually, I'll be willing to pay more than $55.80; I'll be willing to pay $82. If I'm willing to get a zero return, I'll be willing to pay $100 for that security today. If I'm willing to accept a negative return, I'll pay a price over $100. That's the way valuations work. The higher the rate of return you're going to bargain for, the lower the price you have to pay.

> So when people say low interest rates justify higher prices, what they're really saying is that low interest rates justify low returns on stocks.

> So to say that interest rates are at record lows, therefore these record high valuations are OK, is identical to saying that interest rates are at record lows therefore the expected returns on stocks should also be at record lows.

> But that's not what people actually are thinking. They're thinking, no, justify means I'm going to be OK, that I'm going to earn normal returns. Oh no you're not."

As written, the statement by Ford is wrong, it is important to keep a kind of Tabu list detailing what didn't work in the absence of gradient information. What experts get wrong is they fail to be sensitive to dependent parameters that are not static (I know the article says something like this too but it sort of glosses over it). The problem is many of these are hard to say outside of hindsight.

Perhaps listing the requirements before launching and listing the state of those requirements after failure, in addition to the idea might form a basis for what to retry. An expert might say something like "A website for dog food and toys will never work, we already did that 20 years ago and it failed spectacularly", when they should be saying "A Website for dog food did not work 20 years ago, here were our requirements and environment, has anything changed?". But even that isn't perfect so the process can't be deterministic.

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

To me, this is a big thing that survivorship bias overlooks, to the detriment of us all. Taking Edison's "1000 failures to invent a lightbulb" can often be more instructive than the end result, even if you're not interested in inventing lightbulbs.

> The advice to be wary of experts reminds me of the advice to avoid criticism while brainstorming, the idea in common being that criticism and negativity supposedly stifles creativity.

I think the admonition to avoid criticism during brainstorming is so that any idea, no matter how infeasible, may be put forth. As I've understood it, this period of "unfettered criticism" should be markedly short, and while ideas will be recorded for future reference (and perhaps modification), they can safely be winnowed under the harsh criticism of reality after the brainstorming session.

That said, it has been common sense for quite some time that having a "box to think in" can help foster creative solutions to escaping the box.

So if that’s how scientists do it - who should be the most amenable profession to new information and ideas, what chance do the rest of us have?

This article resonated strongly with me.

Your attempt-fail-stigmatise curve has a lot in common with the Gartner hype cycle.

Nobody wants to be a patent troll, but being too early and filing patents can set you up for late revenue. Even if it's just watching for patent trolls and licensing your patents to the victims to double troll.

Comes down to the old “Would you rather be famous for a great thing you never did, or have done something great without anybody else realizing it?”

You experienced the same things as Elon Musk. When he pitched Zip2, the execs from Yellow Pages laughed at him, shoved the yellow pages book over the table and said, “So you think you’re gonna replace THIS?”.

What you're saying is that you have seen things and done things like Elon Musk. You didn't get the wealth and the recognition. But that you have these things "in you" - how many people can say that about themselves? You not only had really visionary ideas that were proven right within a decade. But you also built a Google Docs and a Netflix before Google and Netflix did.

You're one of the Semmelweises or Lickliders of history. They didn't get rich, and most people don't know about them. But they are the ones who actually drive our world forwards. They are the ones who go "Zero to One". The others are just resellers, even if they end up getting all the credit.

[1] I mean, the guy was bullied at school and still did not, as one might expect, end up being driven in life by “paying them back”, or by retreating from humanity. This trait of “taking a lot of crap without becoming dirty himself” is an underestimated quality that he has.

Another "loose attempt to make this argument rigorous" might be to invoke Grim Trigger [1] strategies from repeated PD games. A very large negative weight is placed on "dishonest" behavior across a communication channel (game).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grim_trigger

Say, for example, a cancer researcher makes a statement like "Red wine contains compounds that might protect from some cancers" - not very interesting as news. So it gets magnified to "Red wine CURES cancer".

Next, another expert says "excessive use of alcohol can increases the risk of certain cancers". Of course the news converts this to "Alcohol causes cancer".

Finally, combine these two messages and people quite understanderbly conclude that cancer experts have no idea if alcohol causes or cures cancer.

One chapter later: "The fool listens to most of it" (also paraphrased).

If you don't have the time to sort it all out, don't listen to all the viewpoints. Society, collectively, is insane - it believes so many contradictory things that could not all possibly be true. You can't listen to society or "they say" as a guide. You'll get nonsense.

But part of this is on the news, especially television and internet news. They need a hot take for this hour to draw eyeballs. It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to be new and different. But if you're trying to follow it to learn what to do to protect yourself in the pandemic, it's a hopelessly self-contradictory jumble. People wind up saying "They lied to us! They're still lying to us!" The problem is that "they" - the "they" that the media present to us - is too big a set.

Now, individual experts still can be mistaken, give bad advice, or even lie. But no expert is as confused as the union of all the experts.

Real experts have name and surname yet in my country they created groups of experts all the time for politicians to confirm their ideas.

"The experts" say we must raise taxes (in my area only personal income can be up to 54% of your earnings). I do know experts, without the quotes, who are totally against this tax abuse.

Also, for some reason, I did not see any expert yet for the taxing stuff or the pandemic medical teams that were supposed to exist and we did not get even names or surnames of them. Strange to say the least...

Now extend this to all areas possible that have political intereset and this is basically what "experts" are: excueses used by politicians of all colors to convict nce people of their stuff.

The specific claims are

Higher than expected inflation

> new data showed that America’s consumer price inflation rose to 5.4% in June, well above economists’ expectations. On July 14th it was revealed that British inflation rose to 2.5% in June, which was also higher than forecast.

The specific reason high inflation was not expected was because expected long term slump, which didn't happen

> Not long ago economists tended to the view that the covid-19 pandemic would lead to a prolonged slump in the rich world. That view has not worn well

> With unexpected growth has come an unexpected spurt of inflation

– Tara Ploughman

It's a pain, but one of the nice parts is that it drives you to look for deeper principles. E.g., when my dad started coding, machine time was really expensive as was storage space, so everybody optimized for those things. Hello, Y2K! Now the opposite is true: developer time has gotten more expensive, and computation is cheap. In one sense, that invalidates a lot of old expertise. But on the other, optimization is still usually important, we're just optimizing for different things. A little reframing of habits and you can end up with a more flexible and subtle model.

Incidentally, Morgan Housel, the author of this essay is a very good financial writer - worth reading his other essays too.

Doesn't MMT just tell us that we should focus on inflation instead of The Deficit?

I don't think any of its adherents believe that printing money is consequence-free; rather, MMT states that over-printing money will eventually result in inflation, and we can choose to respond to that inflation by either reigning in government spending (which enables us to dial back the money printing), or by raising taxes (thereby decreasing the money supply).

Its prescriptions are largely the same as the current mode of economic thought. If you spend too much, you'll have to pay for it somehow. Arguably, it just offers a better model of the trade-offs between taxation/spending/printing/inflation, and suggests a different feedback mechanism to drive policymaking decisions (inflation instead of deficit levels.)

I have been to a social services building, many times, that also has a homeless shelter.

I often see shelter residents hanging outside.

They almost all have cellphones.

They are probably bottom-tier Android devices (all the phones I saw looked like smartphones).

Instead of making me think that “the homeless are coddled,” it reinforces my opinion that smartphones have become a basic human requirement.

Compare an army scout on a Starcraft map. First they make visible the entire map. Then they start tracking details. They detect patterns: if it rained last week, this area will be flooded, and other routes are faster.

The army scout operationalized their expertise, made it valuable to others, and hence has something of value to exchange. Anything which attacks their operationalized expertise thus attacks their livelihood. They invested all this energy into materialization, and are prone to sunk-cost fallacy and economically motivated thinking. Don't patch their exploit!

If the hive has enough energy for another scout, then too much communication and history of failure of the current expert may negatively effect their own diverse map constructions. There are multiple ways to victory and it is better to know all of these in case one way is flooded. But it is very risky for one agent to explore all these roads.

Imagine any time the new scout wants to veer of the map, or when it has rained, the expert loudly exclaims: I already checked that road last year, you can not veer of the map there. Also, take these roads, they are always shorter when it rains. Now last month, the roads stopped flooding after rain, but the expert did not waste a failed exploration on that, and the new scout never gets to try (they also do not want to waste energy on failures, but now contribute to enforcing the wasted/stale energy materialization of the outdated expert.

For the expert to admit their ideas are outdated, is to admit their own loss of value. Retiring a fighter who practiced a defense against a kick people stopped using in the 90s. Hardly, if ever, they themselves step down. They want to keep "continuous learning" and adding even more detail to their expert map. When the hive veers off the map, the expert knows they are at a disadvantage, their value no more than a newby scout. Ossification is in their best interest (but not in the interest of the hive).

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/41/e2021636118

The size of scientific fields may impede the rise of new ideas. Examining 1.8 billion citations among 90 million papers across 241 subjects, we find a deluge of papers does not lead to turnover of central ideas in a field, but rather to ossification of canon. Scholars in fields where many papers are published annually face difficulty getting published, read, and cited unless their work references already widely cited articles. New papers containing potentially important contributions cannot garner field-wide attention through gradual processes of diffusion. These findings suggest fundamental progress may be stymied if quantitative growth of scientific endeavors—in number of scientists, institutes, and papers—is not balanced by structures fostering disruptive scholarship and focusing attention on novel ideas.

A crafts teacher divvied up his class in two parts. One part he taught his expertise at vase making, down to the level of detail, in context of art history. They were to be graded on a single vase, so failure was frustrating and a frightening loss of energy/hurt ego. The other part of the class was to be graded on the number of vases they made. The crafts teacher focused on teaching them to learn from mistakes, cut losses and start over, how to get better at the mechanics instead of the art. In the end, the part of the class graded for most vases made, also created the highest-graded single vases. Failure was a necessary part of the initial exploration phase, allowing them to exploit unclaimed ground, instead of trial-error-mimicking already-existing expertise. There is a lesson there, I think. Deep Learning comes to mind, before and after its hype. Where the statisticians correctly calculated flooded roads of overparametrization, engineers still charged ahead, and some actually came out alive on the other side, establishing a shortcut/conquered obstacle. Some statisticians still don't want to get their feet wet. And this ok too! There may be more elegant ways, which keeps dry boots with similar outcomes. Let them find these.

Some ideas are ahead of their time; some are just bad.

Tesla is not the exception, matter of fact it's the poster child of a world where the stock market going up becomes the goal pf both the elected and non-elected branches of the government and not an agnostic measurement tool to check how American public companies are faring.

You seem to be equating "prestige" in a topic with being an expert in a topic - the two are not necessarily related.

eg the more outrageous or unusual the claim from an "expert" (hence the less likely to be right), the more memorable that claim will be, or the more likely it will get attention. And the more someone is a "nobody", the more likely that their numerous eventually wrong claims will be dismissed or forgotten about compared to the memorable times some random was correct by accident.

Likewise I find the more certain someone is of something that is still uncertain, the more likely they will be to be wrong. The alternative of wishy washy consensus full of qualifications doesn't report well if at all, and tends to have minor errors picked apart and amplified even while broadly correct overall.

> I wish we had a different term for people who self-ossify, glorify ignorance, and take it upon themselves to dictate to others why they're wrong.

Your Dad is correct about your stereotyping.

Mitch McConnell is too old to be a Boomer but is part of the Post War generation. Milton Friedman was part of the Pre War generation.

In one case I was brought in only to give a high level synopsis about how deleted files can often be carved out either in full or in part, may appear in multiple places at once, sometimes clearly showing edits, and also come with useful metadata stored within the directory entries both past and present.

They referred to me as the "Computer Filesystem Expert" which I thought was a bit strange, because I'm not what I'd consider an expert in file systems. Hell, I only barely know how journaling works without breaking down. I just know a lot about a very specific set of details that are useful in a forensic investigation.

So there is yet another use of the word "expert" that doesn't necessarily mean the same thing to everyone. It's not a useless title in this case, but it's really ambiguous to a person who understands more than the role requires.