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Comment by michpoch | Hacker News Reader

> The story goes something like this, I get recommended a clip on YouTube, there’s a man who is calm, articulate, and says something that completely violates the narrative. How fascinating. Is my understanding of the world completely wrong?! I need to read everything this man written.

I think author understanding of the world is not wrong, but his approach - definitely. He expects to find some "wise man" who would have answers on all the world problems, sort of a panacea-man, which is clearly not a smart approach.

If someone was an expert for covid-related topics, why would you even watch this peron videos analysing Ukraine war? That makes zero sense.

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It's the behaviour I notice rather than the stated motives;

> But dear reader see this pattern for what it is... every 6 months I find someone new to obsess over... Without fail, each one of comes to disappoint.

Serial obsessive fixation seems a problem right there in itself. There's a deep need that isn't being satisfied. What is it?

> says something that completely violates the narrative. How fascinating.

A rebel! One validated by popular opinion no less!

The problem is, no matter how many rebellious public intellectuals we binge on, it will not take one any closer to being that rebellious and fascinating person. Escape from such a cycle is to jump directly to being that which you wish to be. Do not pass "Go". Do not collect $200.

Find what is so odious in this "narrative" of which you speak, and loudly denounce it!

But beware, if you like to have friends. Instead of being the cool, interesting person at the party, who knows all the latest, internet-celebrity-validated talking points, you will be the bus loony in the anorak who people avoid. Trust me, I've lived it for 40 years. With some guile you can go to ground disguised as university professor for a while.

> Serial obsessive fixation seems a problem right there in itself. There's a deep need that isn't being satisfied. What is it?

I do feel that the author has some interesting personality trait - but I'm not sure if he's in the minority.

After writing my comment I have realised that maybe it's why I never understood the appeal of Twitter. I have never had any "gurus" or "authorities" that I'd universally respect. I could never understand why would I follow some individual on twitter - why would I care? When I read that the author says he follows that "person" so deeply, watching their videos for hours, I completely can not relate. Neither on logical nor emotional level.

I might dig into a topic, let's say, siege of Berlin during II WW, but I'd be focusing on the topic and the source / author will be completely irrelevant. I'll even probably select various ones, as I enjoy challenging my own perspective.

Old Twitter was much better for offering you a plethora of perspectives, especially of random individuals "on the ground", in whatever sense, who were not professional talking heads. That time is long gone.

While I don’t use social media, nor am I prone to personality obsession like the author, there’s definitely something to be said about following an “authority” on Twitter and the like. Whether they’re an artist whose work you enjoy, a top expert in a field you’re interested in, or simply a person whose writing on some topic you appreciate, surely there’s an individual whose insight you’d find valuable enough to “follow”?

> surely there’s an individual whose insight you’d find valuable enough to “follow”?

Not me. What I would like to follow is a topic that interests me, with discourse predominantly populated by subject matter experts. "User-based" follow systems like Twitter only make sense insamuch as the user sticks to their expertise, and as soon as they start veering away into new topics their comments are just as likely to be noise as the average schmuck, and I don't know why I would want to waste my time deliberately consuming noise.

You should check out Hacker News!

People are discussing different things here.

What you describe wanting, is what academic journals are. Subject matter experts discussing that subject matter with one another. Social media is not for you, and that's fine.

What other people are describing, is more like, an author writes a book you enjoy; so you read another book of theirs. There is enjoyment in their prose style and personal voice, and so they seek out more of the same.

And maybe the first book was a scifi or mystery novel, and the next book you find by that author is a non-fiction history of egypt, or a genetics textbook. You will likely still enjoy reading that book.

Sometimes that author can even be an expert on all such topics; Issac Asimov existed, after all. But when people are reading for entertainment, they'll be less picky.

> surely there’s an individual whose insight you’d find valuable enough to “follow”?

Not really. I'd rather follow a site with news in topics that are of my interests (e.g. https://electrek.co/) than some short-form messages of an individual. If these tweets would be containing links to their blog then I'd rather check the blog occasionally.

> I could never understand why would I follow some individual on twitter - why would I care?

Because if someone puts out good tweets at a reasonable frequency, then following them means you will have good tweets in your feed at a reasonable frequency.

You might also get a lot of terrible tweets in your feed, but that's fine, that's how Twitter works, you just scroll past the terrible stuff.

It's not a million miles of subscribing to a newspaper. You don't expect every piece to be good, but as long as there are a few good things every week, it may be worth it.

What I have learnt is that the majority of people are not interesting enough to keep quiet just to be "allowed" to be around them. The number of people I respect and am interested in listening to their opinion goes down from year to year, with experience. Most people are jerks that deserve to stay in their bubble with their "friends".

In a neighbouring thread we're talking about "conviviality" (Ivan Illich's "Tools for..."

It's an odd word.

What I found is that almost every random bore at the pub has a wealth of interesting stuff to say. You just have to tease it out. You have to work at conversations. It's a bit of a lost art imho.

The first step is always to get the topic off the mainstream (stop exchanging platitudes) by showing an interest in some marginal personal remark. Doesn't work for everyone of course. And some people just don't want to.

Living in Finland I learned the art of just being quiet around others and that "interesting company" can be hanging out without words, say just appreciating a walk together.

So I'm with in theory. People are interesting for the most part. However the amount of work to reward you are describing is tantamount to pulling up hedgerows in zelda for coins. Your not likely to find anything amazing but maybe once in awhile interesting. Again probably depends on the establishment

Nah if you’re good at it. It can be amazing every time. But like anything, it feels like a lot of work before you get good at it.

Amazing every time? Wouldn't it get redundant?

No because every interaction is different. And yes if that’s your mindset, every time.

It is increasingly common for people to cut out topics their tribe doesn't like.

Conversations (on the surface level) have become narrow.

It's the pursuit to reveal a very specific meaning, and the connections around it. It won't go anywhere.. people will want freedom from it.

A cousin of mine in her 20's has a podcast. I listened in on one and was surprised to hear that whe was giving out financial and investing advice. For context, she lives with her husband in his childhood bedroom with her inlaws, and works two or three days a week as a health professional. She has virtually no savings or investments, relies on her inlaws for food, and has an expensive Jeep on a 6 year loan. Interesting to think that folks are listening to her advice as though she is an expert.

I can believe it. There are those skilled at performative intellectualism, i.e. sounding very smart and insightful, but the performance itself is the product, it is all they sell and offer. Whenever I hear a public speaker appealing to supposed ancient wisdom of obscure tribes and traditions who had better-than-modern diets, laws, monetary policy, medicine, footwear (or lack iof), etc then that tells me that it’s just more hucksterism

Also, it just takes a lot of time to produce that kind of content

The people with the knowledge/experience are often busy doing real world stuff

For others, producing that content is the "best" thing they can do with their time, but ironically that means you probably don't want to listen to them

I’ve begun noticing this performative art play out more and more often on HN lately, especially in threads regarding medicine and healthcare. Apparently everyone became an armchair doctor and got their public policy degrees while on lockdown. It usually leads to a deep discussion with just one comment buried in the middle of the stack going “uhm, wtf?”

I should start a list of red flags in my notes. “Inflammation” comes to mind as well as any sort of explanation that invokes evolutionary biology or neuroscience.

The gut is the second brain. I've learned this after I've cured my self-diagnosed ADHD via peptides. (I still take Adderall tho)

Anyway, basically what I'm saying is, if the CO2 levels go above 500ppm in my room, I get extreme brain fog.

Is it obviously a wrong approach?

You see someone make sense of a complex topic, be able to cut through bullshit and appearances, you can use that as a "character witness". Maybe that person has solid thought processes and may get other complex issues right too. There are a few people who I see to be often proven right.

Clearly there is a middle ground, we should not blindly follow some authority, but some skills generalize, and some people may be worth listening to on general topics, and not just the ultra-specialized experts.

It is an obviously wrong approach. There are plenty of intelligent people out there, this doesn't keep them from being occasionally wrong. If you have access to the opinion of people who devoted their whole lives to the field in question, why would you seek it from an influencer that perhaps gained fame from being an authority in a couple of non-related fields?

In the last couple years there was more than ample opportunity to see how badly this approach fails, you have droves of these "public intellectuals" as TFA calls them for every crisis (COVID, energy crisis, russian wars, gaza etc.) and almost all of them are just Average Joes dishing out their BBQ-level hot takes in public. Remember all the math and physics PhDs in 2020 suddenly being genius experts on disease modelling? The same people who suddenly became experts on warfare some time in early 2022? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Yes. This was prominent when Russia invaded Ukraine. It was as if millions of people woke and decided, "I'm tired of being an infectious disease expert. Starting today, I'm a military intelligence expert!"

Quite a lot of those millions were account farms which simply got repurposed, maybe with a new name and profile, maybe not.

Thing is, none of the people i followed for COVID takes did that. They've carried on posting about infectious diseases. So i think it is possible to distinguish between these barbecue-level fake public intellectuals, and real experts, because apparently i did that.

That people do pay attention to the Tomas Pueyos of the world is a problem - but not because it's impossible not to, just because they're doing it!

You know, there is a difference between Covid denialism and saying “maybe we should have invested in a lot more air purifiers and good ventilation”. I’m butthurt about the lack of science used for understanding an airborn contagion even by our elected officials.

Scientific people who are outside of a field that has institutional scientific blindness problems are absolutely allowed to call out that bullshit when we see it. We don’t get upset when a non chiropractor says that chiropractors are hucksters. I should not be lumped in with Covid deniers for pointing out that most disease experts massive undervalued and underutilized air ventilation techniques (an example technique would be doing regular activities, like classes, outside)

The thing about being a professional contrarian is you don't need to know anything about the underlying subject, or have special access to information, you just follow the mainstream media and say the opposite.

Meanwhile I saw a friend of mine who actually is an immunology PhD get driven off Twitter in 2020 by angry mobs.

> It is an obviously wrong approach.

Is considering oneself an omniscient Oracle the right approach?

> If you have access to the opinion of people who devoted their whole lives to the field in question, why would you seek it from an influencer that perhaps gained fame from being an authority in a couple of non-related fields?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences)

For myself, the domain(s) that the "influencer" has skills within is crucially important, as certain domains encompass or intersect with almost all others.

This is an interesting comment section from certain specific perspectives, but if one lacks the necessary background you could miss out on the show entirely.

> You see someone make sense of a complex topic, be able to cut through bullshit and appearances, you can use that as a "character witness". Maybe that person has solid thought processes and may get other complex issues right too. There are a few people who I see to be often proven right.

But do they really cut through bullshit and appearances? The individuals that the author has mentioned are mostly oversimplifying the world.

> Maybe that person has solid thought processes and may get other complex issues right too.

That's the issue here - treating real world issues as a though experiment. It creates solutions that are very appealing to people who perceive themselves as thinkers. The ideas are usually simple, round, fair, based on some fairness coming from nature or math, but they completely discard the complexity of the problem. As soon as you start adding corner cases it solution fails.

You can see that as well in software engineering - if only we could simplify the problem we're trying to solve, the solution would be so clean!

> why would you even watch this [person’s] videos analysing Ukraine war?

Because that was how you began life.

Your parents (and later/lesser, primary school teachers) were the source of answers on nearly everything.

There’s probably something quite natural about transferring a belief of being competent/knowledgeable in one area into some expectation of the same in another area. It's the underpinning of the "appeal to authority" logical fallacy.

It certainly works in the opposite direction: someone whom you know to pontificate out their backside on one topic, that expectation holds for the next, randomly chosen topic as well.

If someone is a free thinker and person of knowledge and eloquence that I respect I'd probably be interested in hearing their position on pretty much any topic, not just their narrow field of professional interest. Take Noam Chomsky for instance, I seriously doubt that that many people online listened to his lectures on linguistics, right?

This is very true. I think part of the issue is that there's an element of critical thinking skills that you would hope to eventually acquire _AS_ you continue to listen to any attributed public intellectual. Otherwise you can go your whole life reading Christopher Hitchens from when he was a great rhetorician and contrarian of US foreign policy to his transformation of racist war-mongering anti-theism days.

That's difference in knowledge vs intelligence though. We see repeatedly that people with expert knowledge are frequently wrong because they shape what they see to fit their knowledge. Intelligent people can give more insight on a variety of topics without having expert level knowledge just because they are smart and can put the puzzle together differently.

It's the adage of "when you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail."

Intelligent people have a full toolbox to analyze things with but domain experts tend to only have increasingly large hammers.

> Intelligent people can give more insight on a variety of topics without having expert level knowledge just because they are smart and can put the puzzle together differently.

Citation needed. This sounds like a Rationalist power fantasy which doesn't fit my experience of the world at all.

Violating the narrative is irrelevant. But if someone writes something interesting, logical, that I didn’t already know, I usually look for more, whether it’s hn comments , github projects, youtube videos, arxiv papers etc. once I see something particularly dumb or illogical from them, I stop. Especially if I found some other rabbit hole to follow.

why would you even watch this peron videos analysing Ukraine war?

So I do this, a lot. Rogan is a good example I struggle with. I regularly go I wonder what Joe Rogan thinks about this, on subjects I know he doesn’t know shit about or is just plain wrong about. It isn’t relegated to just Rogan.

Musk was another awful one when you first get into him.

This has to be a form of non-sexual attraction I think. I’m not gay, but how is this not gay? Like, what the fuck, am I in love with these people?

I almost have to shake my head and snap out of it.

Edit:

I’ll add that I’ve gotten extremely good at filtering his guests but still weak to filtering him (it’s kinda like still having feelings for your first). Anytime he puts on a comedian I always go “yeah whatever, who cares what some random comedian thinks about ______”, but I wasn’t able to do that with Rogan. No sir, I listen with both ears as he describes like … nuclear fusion.

I think the term "para-social relationship" might help you.

Yes, this is a textbook parasocial relationship. No judgment—me too. I've been listening to the "New Heights" podcast a lot recently, so my most recent parasocial relationship is feeling like Jason and Travis Kelce are my friends. Of course I know they're not, it's just how these things work. Parasocial relationships are ubiquitous in the modern day.

My favorite analogy is that parasocial relationships are the Doritos of socialization: appealing. delicious, addictive, can temporarily keep hunger at bay—but fundamentally not satiating, lacking in essential nutrients, and unhealthy when they displace their original natural & more nutritious alternatives.

Genuinely I think a lot of these people would be better off if they got into k-pop or something rather than geopolitics.

Bro, so what u saying, u saying millions of us are effectively Rogan simps in a parasocial relationship?

These relationships are on both sides (e.g AOC on the left).

Yes, and yes?

It's kind of inescapable in modern politics, because it's effective at getting people elected and/or making money. It's not the worst way to get elected; certainly better than relying on narrow donor class money. Just .. recognize the limitations of it.

I’m inclined to agree. The problem is, unlike High School where the kids just grow the fuck out of all the stupid teenage bullshit, adults seem to not have that kinda structure going on.

So instead of being a Rogan stan for those weird years in High School, you are grown ass 30 year year old Stan who’s been stanning for 5 years now minimum.

Adults today don’t know how to snap out of the high school shit they easily snapped out of after high school. It’s like we’re in a high school that never ends.

I don't think that's "adults today". Adults in the past also had parasocial shit going on. Do you think the people banging on Sherlock Holmes's author feeling personally betrayed by the ending were all young kiddos?

I think the issue with being an adult is that you often think you've outgrown childish inclinations. In actuality, I find adults will act childishly and then assume, because they are adults, their behavior must be mature and taken seriously.

I know a lot of leftists. Not one has ever sent me a link to an AOC podcast. Does she even have a podcast?

Until I dropped social media, I was getting Rogan links all the time.

Somewhat weird comment...I thought it was obvious, I and others are occasionally interested in what e.g. Joe Rogan has to say because it's entertaining.

I didn't think this was in any way confusing or surprising, and never thought this had anything to do with love.

Isn't this the position of most people?

> never thought this had anything to do with love

Plenty of couples started with "oh he's so cute and funny" / "I love listening to her jokes", and few years later found themselves retelling those stories to a wide audience, at their wedding.

Maybe an "appeal to authority" type situation which is guiding an anxious brain? e.g. Rogan has a massive following, therefore you wonder: "why does this person have such a massive following? It must be because they have important things to say. I had better listen too."

I think as men we have a deep seated need to have a strong leader we respect. If we went into the woods and made a tribe I’d for sure want Joe Rogan or Elon Musk making the decisions. Joe Rogan gives even the village idiot a fair shake to make their point on his podcast. It’s like watching a wise king preside over court. There’s not some big gay mystery here, it’s hardwired “if we go hunting a mammoth, I want Joe Rogan leading the hunt and presiding over the feast!”.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170131155837/http://www.nybook...

"I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric."

(if you've never read the whole thing, it's worth it, far beyond the list)

I keep hearing this meme repeated lately (most recently by the My Pillow guy), and I guess my brain is wired differently, but oh boy, would I hate that society.

"Great person" ideology never works. Nobody is right about most things, and nobody is an expert on more than a few things, it simply isn't feasible.

I don't understand asking non-experts their opinion on basically anything.

Really, you can't think of a better conceivable leader than Joe Rogan or Elon Musk, even in a fantasy scenario you've invented?

A guy standing up every week declaming with moral authority? The word you are looking for is preacher.

And that's what these people are. They provide a comforting sense of moral certainty and judgement; they define enemies, usually a nebulous Them; they're satisfying to listen to; and they publish on a schedule to reinforce the little ritual of listening to them. You've heard the adhan and you are called.

> This has to be a form of non-sexual attraction I think. I’m not gay, but how is this not gay? Like, what the fuck, am I in love with these people?

People have somehow lost all the words for communicating relationships between people that aren't sexual. Although the "fan" relationship can get pretty weird at times. It's interesting to hear from someone who's liminal enough to realize that they're inside the experience but also knows what's wrong with it. Thank you for this post.

> I wonder what Joe Rogan thinks about this, on subjects I know he doesn’t know shit about or is just plain wrong about

See also "Gell-Mann amnesia" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect

This might be enlightening for you on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9K3WnyuyFo

If you are trying to be a well-rounded person with well-founded opinions on different topics, it makes sense to believe that there are others like you who are further along the way.

Both of your examples have a very strong technical component, either understanding the underlying biology/epidemiology or understanding war theory and practice. It is indeed unlikely that someone is an expert in both.

But many important topics have far fewer, if any, objective truths attached to it. In the case of covid restrictions, opinions should obviously be founded on science, but science can only inform our moral choices, not make them for us. Is the damage done to developing minds worth locking down schools if it reduces the spread of covid? Can there be a state/societal mandate to force people to stay in their homes, or even to get vaccinated?

You can come to very different conclusions based on how your worldview is constructed, and I think the sign of a true intellectual is that they can coherently describe theirs, and make other intellectuals understand it, even if they are diametrically opposed to it.

> If you are trying to be a well-rounded person with well-founded opinions on different topics, it makes sense to believe that there are others like you who are further along the way.

Maybe that's the issue with me. The more I learn, over years, the more cautious I become about forming an opinion. It's very rare that things are black or white, I can see it being all very grey. So if I see someone describing, with full confidence, that this is good and that is bad, without all that load of middle-tones, it just makes me feel that they either are not too smart or do not have good intentions.

> You can come to very different conclusions based on how your worldview is constructed, and I think the sign of a true intellectual is that they can coherently describe theirs, and make other intellectuals understand it, even if they are diametrically opposed to it.

I can see the appeal here. What I do not understand is, why would you approach that person as an authority?

> It's very rare that things are black or white, I can see it being all very grey

Yes, it's much easier to paint the whole world one color than trying to paint it in two colors: you'd have to make distinctions and that's quite hard. But on the other hand, if two colors are not enough to paint the whole world, surely one color is even less enough?

Philosophical dithering; reduce any concept to micro black-and-white distinctions to create the perception of grayscale when viewed in whole

That might be an interesting experiment. Poll people on a large scale about dozens of minuscule moral issues that can be determined as GOOD or EVIL, then try to assemble more complex moral issues out of these building blocks. You could end up with some sort of statistical model of morality.

<< Maybe that's the issue with me. The more I learn, over years, the more cautious I become about forming an opinion.

Yep. Naturally, there is a weird social pressure to have an opinion now even if it ends up being just wrong later. Somehow just waiting is not acceptable. You need to take a stance and declare yourself as team A or team B ( or more ), which only adds to the further tribalization of our discourse.

The best phrasing of that I've seen is "you don't need to issue a statement on everything, you're not an embassy".

> it's very rare that things are black or white, I can see it being all very grey

When I was a teen I saw the world as black and white.

When I got in college I knew they are all grey.

And now I understand there are different shades of grey. Most of time we have no enough information to tell, but sometimes it's worth to look closely to distinguish them.

It's not really English to have a 'well-founded' opinion..

Opinions are not based on knowledge or certainty.. they're opinions.

I miss when opinions were a thing you said to get the 'nothing' out and a probative suggestion that started conversations.

Locking opinion down to knowledge and certainty is essentially non-sensical in English.

The old saying was 'opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one'. Perfectly encapsulates how serious opinions are.... not at all serious, by design.

> If someone was an expert for covid-related topics, why would you even watch this person's videos analyzing the Ukraine war? That makes zero sense.

it does make sense, you can understand multiple things. especially after researching it.

I'd agree, but then the number of people that I meet who are otherwise intelligent and thoughtful, but have a casual, uncritical belief in the ability for Elon Musk to lead humanity forward on multiple fronts is shocking. Have you ever heard of the "all in" podcast?

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