Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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On the topic of opinion masquerading as fact - if you check the dynamics there it quickly gets quite interesting. Political arguments are unusual if they involve an expert. On the big ones (economics, medical, military and technical policy) it is relatively rare to see an expert and doubly rare to find one who isn't pushing some sort of agenda. There tends to be a tiny pool of people doing a speaking circuit that turn up again and again and they're there for a reason. If you run the numbers on (informed people informing the discourse about a topic) / (people who know about topic) the numbers are a bit grim too.

And a big driver of that seems to be that either the debate isn't about facts so nobody cares, or frequently that the experts don't have a well advertised an opinion on an important subject. It really turns up in economics where finding facts is a challenge. The biggest economic miracle of our time is China's industrial policy and it isn't particularly obvious what the facts about that are.

I'm sure that there are economists who are devoting their lives to figuring out what happened in China because it is an interesting and important topic. But where the facts are being surfaced is not obvious and it isn't going to make its way through the broader public discourse.

TLDR; finding any facts in any public discussion is actually a bit of a challenge. It tends to be opinion all the way down until the trail goes cold.

I generally agree with you, but at the same time don’t think it’s always nefarious. At least personally, I’d say I definitely am more opinionated (have more of staked out positions) in areas I know something about / spent time thinking through - I’d imagine the same is true for many “experts” - it doesn’t mean they are “right” but based on their underlying conceptual frameworks[1], most of the time they’ve come to a conclusion and are going to push that.

[1] I find most policy debates I get into with friends have nothing to do with the policy at hand but rather more core political/philosophical questions underlying their thinking (e.g. do the ends justify the means or are they more individualist va collectivist)

> The biggest economic miracle of our time is China's industrial policy and it isn't particularly obvious what the facts about that are.

I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, but I think it's pretty well understood that the growth of China is thanks to the market reforms in the 70s and 80s.

Yeah, but it's not market reforms advised by the WTO, IMF, neoclassical economists or capitalist countries. If anything, they are bending the rules as much as possible, to the point that the market aspect is a red herring. It's not just a market economy.

>The biggest economic miracle of our time is China's industrial policy and it isn't particularly obvious what the facts about that are.

Is it though? China's economic growth doesn't seem that far off (per capita) from that of South Korea or Taiwan.

My understanding is that China modelled itself on Singapore too, so I'm not expecting any radical policies. But part of the miracle is the scale of the thing, not just what happens per capita. If we go small enough, one man can go from whoever to billionaire in one generation. Getting a billion people up to a nice standard of living is harder than that.

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