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Comment by throw_pm23 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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