Nobody knows what's going on
raptitude.com
raptitude.com
Kind of a bummer to think about.
Why wouldn't the accuracy be higher? Extrapolating that way from limited experience is not something I would personally do. I would read everything, learn gradually, and continue learning and testing information with experiments and more information.
For comments it's a different story. You do occasionally get the real experts, but more often then not, you just get another mediocre human like myself that just voiced their opinion. Furthermore, there is a strong correlation with experts not commenting as they've got better things to do vs the average Joe that is commenting with little effort, essentially outputting significantly more comments. Another detrimental factor is that mentally unwell people will often output orders of magnitude more comments then everyone else, complicating everything even more.
As newspapers have gotten hammered there are fewer and fewer people who actually do that, and more and more bloggers with loud opinions and few facts. Many good sources have gone defunct or given up trying. But there do remain a few sources of decent journalism, where the reporters and editor really are better informed than most laymen.
Most of the comments experts make are just stating their own opinions as well. Take any credible expert in any field and you'll find equally credible experts who completely disagree with them. When experts are communicating with non-experts they're often really bad at explaining which points are just their opinions versus more widely accepted facts, and just as bad as explaining what other equally credible expert perspectives exist on a topic other than their own. They also tend to be pretty bad at explaining where the limits of knowledge in their field are as well.
I would suggest that the ego boost of being a highly regarded expert also tends to make these shortcomings worse with a lot of people, that increasing credibility and reputation can have the effect of increasing dogmatic-ness. Of the topics that I'm somewhat well informed about, I know very few "experts" who are good at explaining the perspectives of their field in a reasonably balanced way, I think Roger Penrose is quite good at doing this, but even he's not perfect and experts with his level of humility are not very common.
I'd assume it is the same logic as comparative advantages in economics; it doesn't make sense for communities to become experts in everything. The only caveat is that people in the chattering communities (eg, journalists, influencers, celebrities) are some of the last to look to for informed opinions on reality since their speciality is attracting attention and telling stories rather than anything linked to success in the physical or academic worlds. They're often clever, just not involved in complex topics.
[0] average = bad. Goes to show how catastrophic dictatorships are that a democracy can consistently outperform one.
There are a lot of problems with that assumption. Thus far it seems to work out better than the alternatives, but we'll have to see if that continues to hold.
Can you expand on this? I have no idea what you mean. In what way do most people vote randomly?
In aggregate, the result of uninformed people voting would be more or less the same as voting randomly.
Not that people vote without thinking.
i don't believe that. at least western media are biased towards majority and conservative views and for profit entities, ignoring or even suppressing minorities and that is making us worse off.
These are all biases that may be politically undesirable to you (the corporate media are basically the vanguard of class warfare, so they should be undesirable to a bunch of people), but they aren't biased in the direction of making things worse at the highest level of abstraction. A rising tide benefits all ships.
If someone is not knowledgeable they will likely buy into some propaganda.
At an extremely high and oversimplified level, that’s more or less random.
It’s a thought framework, not a rigorous explanation
Who's we? I don't expect that at all. "computers" is such a broad subject, with countless areas of specialty, and in my experience HN commenters are often, all too often, quite ignorant of my particular areas of specialty, though that doesn't stop them from overconfidentally asserting falsehoods about those subjects.
Meaning, don't believe that all confident people are bullshiting their way. The best are people that have both expertise and confidence.
This is one reason I like to stay at a company for many years, the expertise boosts my confidence more than linearly (if that makes sense).
Try telling someone that "the process of voting doesn't work that way" or try to clear up some common misconception about the economy or crime and it just doesn't go anywhere. People have a lot of false assurance to back up their mode of thinking and it is nearly impossible to break that. In fact, there is an entire economy in vindicating people's beliefs which makes people even more assured.
I'm convinced the only proper stance on complex ideas, concepts and topics is that we shouldn't have the hubris to think that we completely understand something or even have a solid grasp.
The political discourse around polarizing topics isn't disastrous. It takes place exactly because people realize that they are complex issues not fully understood, and are talking about it in hopes that more information will come to light to help them reach a greater understanding. This is why the more complex the issue, the more it will keep coming up over and over.
human beings are bad at gathering information, inferring the right things from it, and responsibly passing it on to others. It is incredible what we’ve achieved in spite of this
All was achieved when it was widely not so, and by people not affected by this.
As a teacher in middle school I see this demonstrated throughout my classes. I have even started collecting data points on how many times a week a topic or topic adjacent to another topic crops up as discussions in my class. There are almost always heated discussions, but in the end we typically come to an understanding about facts or how we can’t truly know fully situations. There are of course some holds outs, but for the majority we find understanding or compromise.
I read the most about topics that have no clear objective truth. Mostly around Sociology, Psychology and Politics.
Engineering principles I have a deep knowledge of do not attract my attention other than to clear up someone's misconceptions.
We treat thumbs up/down as agree/disagree, whether we're supposed to or not.
They aren't causing it, just furthering our issues for their own goals, and unfortunately it's working pretty well.
Is it immutable? Forks, 51% attacks, bugs. It it only immutable until consensus decides it isn't immutable, right? If something is immutable, but can be made immutable, is it ever really immutable?
The context I think they are proposing blockchain to be useful is in verifiable public information. For information to be verified or analyzed the blockchain can verify the source even offline.
It's still extremely useful as currency as well, though, precisely because it actually is digital currency, and allows direct person-to-person transactions via the internet without requiring a proprietary middleman. The previous commenter's complaint about how it doesn't solve anything if you get scammed is a bit off-target, because dealing with frauds and scams isn't a feature inherent in the currency itself -- it applies equally to any payment solution, especially cash and checks -- and is something we deal with via the legal system regardless of how funds are transferred.
Simple: demand.
The value of Crypto products is based on scarcity dictated by the computationally intensive nature of certain algorithms, and on people believing those products have value.
You mean math?
1. Speculation / belief
2. Approx 10x less influential is trade, most currency transactions both by volume and by value are in speculation which is underpinned and driven by beliefs in a particular currency. Some estimates put trading as low as 2.5% of all forex. Trading does impact the price of a currency, but in miniscule proportions to speculation
3. We can fairly confidently say tax collection is a lower influence than trade because of so many examples (and extraordinarily rare counter examples) but I don’t know of any reasonable way to quantify how much less the effect is. The threat of incarceration and / or asset seizure drives demand for currency which influences its value.
Places like Argentina are fascinating (said while acknowledging the extreme hardship being placed on people who have to use Argentinian currency!). In recent history all of the above have had visible influence on their currency along with pegging / dollarization which attempts to introduce a control on all the above factors with various degrees of success.
Apparently Monero has some weaknesses [0]. Time will tell how effective it is once the mask of parallel construction slips.
You're arguing that we should try out this new, unregulated, and terrible alternative financial system that seems to only be filled with such trustworthy people as scam artists, terrorists, drug dealers, and war criminals because a system designed before computers existed sucked ass. Your audacity is shocking.
A misinformed opinion about the entire crypto environment in a article titled "Nobody knows what's going on"
It was the same way during the 90's Dot-Com era, journalists would explain the World Wide Web with word salad, e.g., the "Graphical portion of the Internet".
With regard to Crypto, I decline to discuss it without mentioning the 3Blue1Brown video, sometimes the gambit works and triggers a better discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4
And I love the comments in that video about being "Confused, but on a higher level".
This passage comes to mind:
> we want so badly to be believed, to be seen as someone who knows stuff.
Some articles posted to HN have poor enough quality that reading a few paragraphs is all they deserve. The false premise is usually evident from the first paragraphs, and there's no reason to read further (unless it's one of those articles where the author changes their mind through a long exposition).
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
Should I only comment if I have a counterexample?
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know." – Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
Hearsay being some personal "truth" it may be useful to know what the statistical average of that "truth" is. If we do it right perhaps we can get the various personal errors to cancel out.
The headlines about some crisis with uneducated comments about how rich bankers exploit the weaks make me hesitate to trust journalism. Often incompetence is way more prevalent than nefariousness ...
Each time I say stuff like that I get comments saying "maybe but it's not a reason to defend banks", completely missing that it's exactly my point: this hatred of banks is a bit irrational, I think it's fine sometimes to defend them...
Granted I’ve mostly seen that in the real estate world, so maybe other industries are less-shit about saying plainly dumb stuff based on “insider knowledge” (self-serving bullshit, actually)
See also: cops and all manner of things, like the relative riskiness of their own job (and which parts of it are risky—all that driving is a lot of the risk, and Covid-19 vs guns is a fun comparison for some years) or how dangerous it is to be within one meter of a small amount of fentanyl or whatever, or how we’ll all just super regret it if we keep them from trampling on civil liberties (common view, not making that up)
Sometimes the insiders know better and everyone else is wrong. Sometimes the insiders are all sorts of mixed up over some comically basic shit.
The problem is that you only see the gains that those who take a loan get, but it only allows them to circumvent the market, and nothing is in fact created, only the resources get misallocated. Somebody else would use what got bought with the money.
Why loans result in resources being misallocated? This doesn’t make sense to me. Say, I have some cash I want to save for retirement. Until then, I loan it to other people to run their businesses. Where is misallocation here?
No money is known that was used before classical antiquity, it must be a mistranslation.
Imagine what would happen if loans on tractors would not be allowed. Then, someone who needs a tractor would need to rent it, instead of buying it. In that world, pretty much the same people who use tractors now would also use tractors. Tractors use would be similarly allocated as today. The main difference is that instead of a bank earning income by renting you money, it would earn income by renting you tractors. The ultimate outcome would be effectively the same.
Loans is just renting, but instead of renting physical objects, you rent money. If you object to renting money, all your objections should apply to renting physical things. Have you thought of that?
Money isn't a resource that is objectively needed, its role is to regulate economy. You could do anything that you do just as well without it, if people could agree on it. It isn't like a tractor that is needed, and there is no problem with renting tractors. The problem is that you do use money in your example: you use it to store your savings. By lending it,it gets used twice - once to buy the tractor, the second time it's still used to store your savings.
It does take away somebody's ability to buy a tractor, as you buy one, so there is one less, or one extra needs to be manufactured. That can also be a problem - too many tractors can be created, so that food gets so cheap that it's basically free,and the farmers now can't make money. Which is what literally happened in the great deoression.
Caveat: I often work on old cars where a short is far more likely.
The internal white papers I've written and also help co-author (which are for discourse/dissertation on successful project implementations and to be used as reference for future work), or when on a stint with IBM doing ITSO Redbooks, were (are?) highly accurate, and involved subject matter experts (which, as the name would imply, were the SMEs that people would contact specifically as THE experts in that field; and, back then, we were really the experts).
OK Ok, you can stay on my lawn for a while longer... /j
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/27/us/required-reading-smith...
That is, it's not yet a widely noticed thing and I feel it helps to spread it around and people generally seem to welcome and understand the concept. It probably does not immediately change how they read - biases are very hard to fight. But it goes in the right direction.
Then I realized this probably applies to many different subjects.
I can’t go back to ignorance ever again.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_Crichto...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect#:~:t....
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect /
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
(spoiler) The author reveals at the end that this quote was made up and falsely attributed to Orwell.
The most ironic part of this article is that the spurious quote will probably now make its way across the internet, whereas the disclaimer will not. Emerson actually did say “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me” - and after I've forgotten this article, I will probably remember that Orwell said no one knows what's going on.
I found another blog quoting this one, but pointing out the quote was fake, and another vaguely similar quote:
"Q: What is a fundamental mistake of man's? A: To think that he is alive, when he has merely fallen asleep in life's waiting-room." - Idries Shah
If there's something useful in the made up quote that is why it's going to be proliferated, whether XY said it doesn't matter, there's not really any practical harm in that false attribution. This is also why crowdsourced predictions are remarkable accurate (and in fact often outperform experts, see Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner), despite most members of the crowd being wrong. As long as the wrong people aren't correlated in some way the average is a really good approximation.
Most stuff being noise and only some stuff being signal is just how the world works in general, it's not even really an insight.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/who-wrote-The-UA.znXC3SXGjv...
(AI search engines are just going to get crappier and crappier as more junk is put in the web.)
- Abraham Lincoln
“Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet just because there’s a picture with a quote next to it” — Abraham Lincoln
I used to watch the news every day and try to stay informed about politics and candidates and to some extent sports and celebrities and other current events. Now I don't. None of it affects me or my day-to-day life. I'm a lot less stressed about stuff and I have more time for stuff that matters to me.
One solution I found is this service that texts one sentence, fact based summaries of 8-10 current events every morning [1].
An alternative free solution is the Wikipedia current events portal [2].
I think it affects you, and everybody.
Just after Russia started to attack Ukraine more intensely again in 2022, there was a chance that Hungary goes into a full blown dictatorship (without voting and such) on the side of Russia. Now, that would have affected me greatly since I’m travelling a ton, and I’m Hungarian, and I was there that time.
Also related to this, I need to pay attention to Hungary some level to tell my parents when to leave. Unfortunately, I started to fail with this, but it’ll be more important again, because the status quo which allowed to pretend democracy is under attack, and we could already see what happens then.
After COVID, it’s even more interesting your statement, because you were affected, and to be effective you had to know what are the “news”. In other words, how people fucked up things. Also, I should have been quite offended why my doctor didn’t want to see me, when I arrived sick from New York two days before the first lockdown there.
Also from the “news” it seems that the general trust between each others plummeted (shrinking number of real life connections, and increasing internet toxicity). That indicates the possibility that democracies are not the optimal strategy on individual level anymore. We need to prepare for that.
Because of the “news” I, my brother and his whole family, and about at least a quarter of my high school class left Hungary (whom I know about). None of these would have happened with the news of the 90s or early 2000s. So it definitely affects larger parts of population.
Since I’ve also started to not read daily news that much, I’m also quite sure that the lack of news is definitely good for my mental health. And I’m definitely more chill. But there is a possibility that I won’t predict something because of this, and I’ll loose money, time, health, or even friendships (I suck with remote connections with my friends).
The cognitive load to fact check everything is too great, so we decide which sources we think are reliable and just accept them. The solution is not to disbelieve everything you are told, but to accept that some of the facts you have not checked might be wrong, and be prepared to re-evaluate when contrary evidence appears.
But a lot of people, without knowledge of finance or economics, want to know *why* stocks moved. And so, we have an entire industry reporting on a daily basis, without any direct knowledge about the thing they are reporting about !
As the author said, there are few penalties for bullshit, and many rewards !
There are of course tangible things that can help explain movements, but truth is - very very rarely those writing the articles know what's going on on the market.
Another funny thing in the market, mostly recently, is that earnings are announced after hours - and most of the movement happen in those after hours - which doesn't really make sense, since the liquidity is very very limited. So how come that just following the earnings, the price of say Tesla will go +10% in the after hours, and then stay pretty much at that level the next day, when real investors and big funds start trading ? Who knows...
"One day, a data-entry error caused the fund to purchase five times as many wheat-futures contracts as it intended, pushing prices higher. Picking up the next day’s Wall Street Journal, sheepish staffers read that analysts were attributing the price surge to fears of a poor wheat harvest, rather than Renaissance’s miscue. [...] “Any time you hear financial experts talking about how the market went up because of such and such—remember it’s all nonsense,” [Peter] Brown [CEO of Renaissance Technologies] later would say."
[0] https://www.gregoryzuckerman.com/the-books/the-man-who-solve...
They move due to information about the stock and the perception (which is a type of information) about the stock. But since you don't know when new information about a company/stock will become public, nor when the perceptional information about it will shift, the changes are effectively random:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street
And if there is new information about it, those that get it first (unlikely to be you) will be able to capitalize on in better; and as it spreads that information will take more and more of an effect on the stock price. To paraphrase William Gibson: the information is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.
i intentionally don't read about the places before going there, to avoid influencing my experience by the subjective reports of others. especially reports of other foreigners.
i'll never experience the life and struggles as a local, especially not when the culture is very different, or the language or its a developing country. at best i get to experience what living in that place as a european, an expat, is like.
but, where i am able to make friends or become part of a local family, i still get way more insights than any tourist would.
while traveling in japan (where i was couchsurfing) i met a young european who claimed to have learned things about japanese culture that generally no foreigner ever finds out and his japanese friends would always be surprised when he told them about some of the things he learned. i could not verify his claim of course, but it was interesting nonetheless.
I don't know, but from personal experience, renting and living in an apartment in Tokyo is very, very different from renting an apartment in America.
>Once you get into the groove of actually living somewhere, don't you just realize it's the same as everywhere else?
No, not at all. Different places are extremely different. There's a reason people move emigrate to other countries. I don't know how you got this idea unless you've never even traveled anywhere else. Maybe I don't understand you correctly.
Anyway, if you're just a tourist somewhere, you might not even care what it's like to live in a place; that's probably not why you're there. But it does mean you have a very different experience there than you would as a long-term resident, and it's quite likely very, very different from your experience as a resident back home.
This means that things that will be a significant issue for a tenant in one location will be irrelevant in another location and vice versa. Understanding the issues on the ground usually requires living in that place for a significant amount of time.
Like South Florida.
Plus the more decades you go back, the more it was unlike the 50 states from Orlando on up.
Also, an absence of evidence is not proof of absence, though it usually appears that it is.
> In the end it’s impossible for us to even assess whether there is a reality out there.
Well, I'd say ontologically / phenomenologically it's basically a sure thing, though whether the nature and ontology of it is anything near what it is said to be is a very different matter!
The brilliant minds that believe we are indeed in a simulation have extrapolated this concept from the weirdness that is found within the realm of quantum, the realm of the sub micro and nano.
Religious folk believe we live in some sort of simulation as well: "You are travelers and sojourners here. This is not your home. God is of spirit not of flesh."
Don't know what 'spirit' is, but it's not carbon-based matter. Don't know what home is, but it's evidently not here. The Bible suggests that nothing here is real and the only real things are found in the spiritual realm.
Simulation, or manufactured space, it doesn't really matter to us. Like Mr. Friedman pointed out, we have to deal with the space around us and whether the space around us is simulation or not is irrelevant.
In a simulation, you are just a bit of data. You can be destroyed or duplicated, multiple instance of you may exist, even at the same time.
In (most) brief of afterlife, "something in you" is unique, last forever, really do matter, etc.
so our life could still be a simulation, and, to use the religious terms, our souls would be the players
it would therefore totally make sense for life to be a simulation, just like a pilot practices in a simulation before flying a real plane.
People believe it is representative, they literally link to it as proof of their claims.
In this way (and there are many others), reality is simulated.
Another way is Indirect Realism, knowledge of which is rarely in working memory.
Another way is that people believe there is only one possible form of simulation, as in "the" simulation theory.
How much work is it to answer that question?
A few examples: Junior devs asking about how to do something - sometimes the answer is clear, there's a standard or a decision has already been made - sometimes someone has to do some work to decide how to proceed. Its easy for people to get frustrated when they think they asked a simple question, but at the point they ask, NO ONE knows the answer.
Do masks work? How much evidence of what types would it take to make a satisfying answer to this question? What would those study designs look like? How large would your sample size need to be? I think it would take a great deal of work just to design the studies and get them past ethical review boards, much less get them funded and completed.
Anything related to diet. Getting real answers takes way more work than can reasonably be done for anything more that the simplest questions.
---
You cannot pretend it is flying when it isn't.
One of the reasons I chose to be an engineer.
That's why I like science and engineering, it's a whole structure that, while not perfect or complete, has self-reinforcement and self-correction built in. And if it's right about something, the proof will be in the pudding. Otherwise, like you say, your airplane will fall out of the sky.
This is a true/false Boolean is it?
> And if it's right about something, the proof will be in the pudding.
What if it's probabilistic, and rare?
So do Boeing know a lot about aeronautical engineering, or are they just guessing? To what extent are they just pretending their planes are flying?
Nothing major about the story was changed, but I know some of the details were incorrect. It bugs me that these are now "facts", and places like Wikipedia confidently state these "facts" without anybody knowing the origin was just small town gossip.
- (probably not) Mark Twain
This is interestingly close to what I think about claims of ChatGPT being ‘as good as an expert’ at, say, mathematics or medicine.
Sure, for obvious failures where water is leaking in a spectacular fashion. But there's tons of shoddy non-obvious projects that work and look fine now. The problems come down the road, years later. Usually these problems come from either cutting corners or working under constraints.
You know those horror stories programmers or sys admins trade? How they saw something and couldn't believe their own eyes? Plumbers have those too, in buckets.
Maybe this whole paragraph about the plumbing is just a meta commentary on the "nobody knows what's going on". In that case, disregard the above.
Instead, the knee jerk reaction seems to be calling for further hollowing out of public education and less investment in traditional news media. I fear what that looks like after a few more decades.
No one trusts them anymore because they have all become partisan. The news nowdays doesn't seem to be about what happened. It's all takes. People disengage as a result. They watch it like sport.
— Superintendent Maillard
No, not always.
There aren’t many clues in the image, but the travel ad and outdoor dining point to somewhere tropical. Looks like a cool place.
Chiang Mai
https://unsplash.com/photos/a-city-street-with-a-puddle-of-w...
---
Taken in Bali.
https://unsplash.com/photos/close-up-photo-of-earth-globe-v6...
I’ve never read one of these that didn’t come off as unbearably smug. Like sure, discerning the truth is hard, duh. But the people who try their best to do it, even if they sometimes fail, are worth immeasurably more than the dead-souled people who decide “might as well sling bullshit since it’s impossible to be totally correct” (if that’s not what the article is saying out loud, it’s certainly what a lot of the commenters are saying)
Edit: Just to end on a positive note, I want to call out the one good piece of content in this genre, which takes Gell-Mann amnesia, flips it, inverts it, and then skewers Michio Kaku for trying to act like he knows about hurricanes: https://youtu.be/wBBnfu8N_J0?feature=shared
Not enough other people know, and so you find yourself fighting against the tide.
It gets lonely.
Oh, right, because FI is about spending a lot on new things constantly...
On top of that, individual experts still carry their own biases in their heads, and they lack any sort of editorial board to service the reader by separating knowledge from bias.
It’s easy for me to cast stones but I also have no answer. The best I’ve come to is to read broadly on topics you need to truly know and compare what you find in your sources. For less important topics just accept that you are likely off the mark and have much to learn.
The thing is, though, that the PPE handling requirements which practitioners like nurses and doctors are trained in, for working in a clinical environment with patients who are highly infectious or highly vulnerable to infection, are not the same as the PPE handling requirements for walking around a supermarket during a public health emergency. Public health usage of masks was not supposed to solve the same problems as masks solve in surgery or in infectious disease care contexts.
Experts are vulnerable to having highly specific knowledge about how something works in a very narrow domain, but overestimating how well that knowledge applies to even quite closely related nearby domains.
Rather, I thought the anti-mask advice came before it was known that masks helped. At the time this was the prudent advice: what they don’t want is people acting like the masks will fully protect them.
I don't think there's a magical answer, but one approach I've found is to try to be a mini expert in a tiny, tiny slice of a bigger area (usually bridging over knowledge from some adjacent area I know). This means that I can then evaluate those who talk about this tiny area, and get a good baysian guess as to there broader expertise from there.
Some fields are such that they are hard to be expert in, but it’s trivially easy to verify expertise when observed. For example, playing tennis. It’s easy to identify a good tennis player even if you can’t play tennis at all. Another classic example is cooking. Even the most caveman-like philistine knows good food.
On the other hand, for some fields, verifying expertise (or ‘mastery’) is as hard as achieving it. Academic disciplines — particularly technical ones like science — are examples. In those cases, you probably have to rely on a trusted authority to verify legitimacy. Without that, you can’t distinguish the accomplished experts from the crackpot blowhards.
One can be a master in certain art, yet can't explain what's going on.
Think cooking: Many chef "searing steaks" to "keep juice in". It don't keep juice in, but it taste good.
Think language: Most native speaker can form grammatically correct sentence, but they can't really explain how. Yet many linguists, knowing how some languages work, keep bullshitting about another language.
Technical sciences are much easier than the social sciences. Social science is much more full of people who have no clue what they are doing than technical sciences, because technical sciences can be verified by experiments while social science is mostly about trust.
I'm not so sure. Identifying good talent is difficult when it comes to sports. There's an entire industry of scouts that try to find decent players ahead of the others. More so, they are tasked with finding out why a particular players is good. It's anything but trivial.
Not that one is trivial and the other is impossible. Of course, if you want to do any task well it becomes nontrivial.
So you are looking for someone with many years of work experience in being an IC or lead or CEO or a researcher with a lab or PhD in that domain with lots of papers in highly respected/ranked conferences/journals. In domains you have no idea about, you might need to first read a book or general article which links back to such experts/sources and then it is easy to find the cluster of those experts in that domain.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
(Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, June 11, 1807)
> without devolving into full conspiracy-esque "trust no one", "everyone has an agenda" type thinking?
Should this necessarily be avoided? Are you asserting that it is not substantially true?
> "If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports."
PS. It is not true that Linebarger was some furry rando.
From a starting point of mereological nihilism, you can absolutely play to people's desire for ontological certainty. For many, many, many, things, what's true is simply the number of people who believe it so.