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Comment by transcriptase | Hacker News Reader

Most PhDs are incredibly specific and don’t necessary indicate broad knowledge of a field as a whole.

Which is why you should be wary of “experts” making overly broad claims about topics within their field but far outside their area of expertise.

Early on during Covid you would see postdoc infectious disease experts on every news channel 3 times daily giving their takes. Some of whom maybe took a 3000 level course in epidemiology when they were 21 and did their PhD on nematode infections in a single population of freshwater clams. Technically an infectious disease expert but I don’t particularly care what they have to say about Covid over a random person on the street either.

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> Technically an infectious disease expert but I don’t particularly care what they have to say about Covid over a random person on the street either.

I would absolutely care more what they had to say over the rando, especially if they prefaced it with their level experience.

Depends on the grade they got in that 3000 course, though I tend to agree with you

Yeah, uh, I wouldn't.

There was a B- or C-list physics blogger a few years back whose graduate homework I used to grade. (I still remember this one, so that should tell you something.) He got very angry that I gave him zero credit for one particular question. But he:

- did not use the standard/expected approach to this problem

- did not explain what he was doing well enough for me to find him any partial credit (this is not easy!)

- had a pile of impenetrable unnecessary very complex alien math that I wasn't going to try to cut through given that

- his final answer was very, very wrong

- in fact, it was wrong by 26 orders of magnitude

- and he didn't have the skill to notice something was wrong (and, yes, I was lenient with students who noticed final answers were weird even if they couldn't/didn't fix it up)

- also, he was a major asshole (no surprise given that he's complaining about this "indignity") who was

- somehow still causing #MeToo problems in the 21st century despite being under 30 (seriously??)

So if that's who gets held up as "authorities", even minor ones, forgive me if I don't listen too much. I'll choose who I trust.

Which point would be enough by itself for you to discount him totally?

Honestly? His mannerisms was all we really needed. He was not well liked in his year, and that takes some doing to achieve these days. The smug "how could I be wrong" when he was, well, 26 orders of magnitude wrong, is special even by entitled scientist standards.

Yes, how we behave usually trumps how true/false our ideas are.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but I strongly believe, based on my experiences with really successful people, that being open to being wrong absolutely does count for a lot more than the current truth value of your ideas.

Yes exactly. Behavior drives success. Not merit. Behavior is social. No sarcasm here, just acceptance of what is obvious.

I didn't say authority, and I didn't say trust blindly. I just said I'd trust someone with baseline qualifications over a random (presumably unqualified) person. lmao

My point is that this person has baseline qualifications (Physics PhD!), was accepted by the media as "qualified" to be a blogger, and yet was still a complete god damned moron even in his own field of "specialization".

It wouldn't have made such an impact except that he was getting paid to publicly write about this stuff, at the same time he was privately incompetent. A stellar example of the Gell-Mann Effect (aka Amnesia) if ever there was one.

> Most PhDs are incredibly specific and don’t necessary indicate broad knowledge of a field as a whole

> Which is why you should be wary of “experts” making overly broad claims about topics within their field but far outside their area of expertise.

I mostly agree, but also I think it depends on how strong you are suggesting this and if you also acknowledge that there is high variance between domains as to the variance within the distribution of knowledge. Your last sentence is where I really disagree. There is a big difference.

But I think for the general person, there's 2 things of note: 1) just because you should be wary of an expert talking outside their niche (but inside their broader domain), doesn't mean that their opinion is equal to that of a layman. I'd still trust the mostly-expert over the non-expert any day. The true-expert is often very hard to find tbh. Look for nuance and you'll increase the likelihood of finding the expert. 2) It is easy to confuse expert talk with arrogance or pretentiousness. It is also easy to be that way when talking to a layman as the nature of those conversations will never be between peers, but more akin to a teacher and student. The two parties are not equal, but we're primed to treat any non-academic setting conversation as if we are. The experts often have serious doubts and are far more self-conscious than they appear. You just won't see that unless you're a peer and can speak the language, because experts are also specifically taught to defend their work and speak with confidence. Your hint is how they respond to critiques from other experts (but that's not easy to do accurately as there's probably a lot of nuance you aren't seeing and they are speaking a different language even if you understand all the words).

Everyone should always be skeptical though. That's for certain. But I just want to make sure we don't turn knowledge into a binary setting: expert vs idiot. There's a lot in-between and that matters a lot.

> I'd still trust the mostly-expert over the non-expert any day. The true-expert is often very hard to find tbh.

Right, you can always find somebody more expert than someone else. The level of specificity that some people expect for a variety of problems will leave only a dozen or so people in the world who can call themselves experts.

Also why she might believe this is an obvious confounding factor and it was clearly not obvious to the authors, or the rest of the world!

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