Kind of a bummer to think about.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/27/us/required-reading-smith...
I can’t go back to ignorance ever again.
Caveat: I often work on old cars where a short is far more likely.
Then I realized this probably applies to many different subjects.
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.
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.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect /
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
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".
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"
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.
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?
Apparently Monero has some weaknesses [0]. Time will tell how effective it is once the mask of parallel construction slips.
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.
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?
Should I only comment if I have a counterexample?
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".
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)
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.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_Crichto...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect#:~:t....
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 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