Articulate and Incompetent
thekcpgroup.com
thekcpgroup.com
For example:
> This leads to a stunning possibility implied by the opening quote. True expert intuition may often be associated with poor explanations. We should therefore be extremely suspicious of neat explanations in the broadest domains.
Does anyone think this is actually a valid or plausible argument for its conclusion? "Expert explanations sometimes don't seem to make sense, therefore don't trust explanations that seem to broadly make sense?"
I understand the value of heuristics, but they're a crutch. You shouldn't be using crutches or wheelchairs all the time when you can walk (i.e. use logic). If you don't walk, your legs will wither away.
I read this a bit differently: Experts often have a hard time explaining their intuitions. That is, they (presumably, as experts) have the correct intuition, but can’t articulate their internal reasoning (and maybe the correct explanation is inherently difficult to understand), while on the other hand it is not very hard to come up with a seemingly coherent ("neat") explanation for pretty much anything. If that is indeed true (I don’t know that it is), then having a "neat" explanation presented could really be a counter-indication, statistically speaking.
I’m halfway sympathetic to that, as "neat" explanations do quite often oversimplify, and reality usually turns out to be more complex. Explanations that also point out their own limitations and caveats tend to inspire higher credence.
Thus I think there needs to be two criteria here: is the argument plausible, and is backed by evidence or demonstrated expertise. Not just one or the other.
Feels obvious once I write it out, to be honest.
> Does anyone think this is actually a valid or plausible argument for its conclusion?
Not particularly. Most critically, it is in itself a neat explanation.
Just two of the interesting observations...
Experts conduct better pre-mortems - that is, given scenarios where eventually something failed, they are able to more accurately predict which parts of the scenario contributed to the failure.
And experts are "two steps ahead" in troubleshooting - which makes it (paradoxically) harder to convince others their direction is correct.
Anyway, great book on the topic, essential reading in my mind.
I think that this type of behavior can be advantageous in a couple of ways. It gets started on a higher rung of the ladder of perceived competence and trust, and that advantage can be compounded over time. The drawback is that over time they start to get a reputation as a bullshitter and people do not trust them to do anything that actually needs to work. And your reputation tends to follow you.
That being said, these types of people can be very valuable members of a team and excel if given the right role and responsibilities.
I'm curious about what roles you think someone like this could bring value to. If "people do not trust them to do anything that actually needs to work", aren't they a liability to the team?
That strikes me as wrong - English is the language with the most words. Why would it be particularly poor in describing the emotional realm? (Presumably, the author means that the English with their stiff upper lip don't have much awareness of their emotions, but the author is specifically referring to words.)
There are emotional-labels that only exist in other languages (e.g. German, Japanese, Russian, Ancient Greek, etc.) that simply have no equal in English (and in that case, we simply steal the word and pump up our total word count).
I feel like English's main purpose is to get people to do things, by making them feel a certain way, or by being so vague and unspecific it can be interpreted in an endless amount of ways. Whereas with German it might be to be exact, and to have every single thing accounted for and labeled.
I guess emotional precision is too costly for the political class lol
Which apparently is not orange block paragraphs. Paragraphs that are not highlights of the black text as you've come to expect. That one got me. And then I realized it was a reflexive statement about catching me. A textual fish trap? I laughed.
Even if this were true, and it's certainly not in the context of fundamental investing, it's what asset managers call untradeable knowledge, e.g., an existence theorem for a number with no tractable means of finding it.
I experienced a robbery in a restaurant, committed by a black man. Yes it really happened, but I should not generalize very much based on that experience -- or if I do, I need to be able to discern which attributes of the experience are incidental and which are relevant, and to weight one-off experiences differently from deep experience in an area of claimed expertise.
GP isn't appealing to authority, he's suggesting a way to get to the heart of epistemological differences.
Strange, I read it as exactly the opposite. Many times, people who are considered authorities in something, such as academics, have little or no real world experience in the matters that they're giving advice on. For example, why should a business owner take advice from an economist, who has never run a business (or even worked outside of academia), on how to run a business? By asking "what have you experienced that makes you believe what you do?", we can at least establish if someone really knows something or is just an "authority".
Similarly, if I see a book about software development, I'd like to know what significant software the author has delivered. If their expertise is mostly in writing books and making YouTube videos, I don't want to waste my time reading their advice.
Ironically, the author of this article seems to work for a "wealth management group", so we should ask what experience they have that would make them a credible source of advice in psychology or brain function. They write nothing about their own actual experience, only quoting various authorities.
"Morgan Housel Author Morgan Housel is a partner at The Collaborative Fund and a former columnist at The Motley Fool and The Wall Street Journal. ... Google Books "