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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> it seems to me that there is an equal amount of people cheering the settlers as there are people against what they're doing

Speaking out of my ass here. But I’d guess most people don’t care. A minority cheers. A minority protests. Most go on with their lives.

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No offense, but why would you speak about a topic you know little about?

Possibly because smart people with expertise, usually hard-won through years of focus and study, make the common fallacy that they are experts in unrelated areas, even if they haven't put in the effort to become experts.

Too many secretly believe they're Renaissance polymaths, instead of being humble enough to admit they don't know something.

Really well said. I would even go further and say that the "smart people with expertise" even disagree on matters like this and are operating on imperfect, vague information. Knowing that, it seems even more ridiculous to ask passersby about their opinion on this. Of course you can have an opinion, but keep in mind you're likely operating in 99% fog. Just my two cents.

I love Tetlock's "Super Forecasting" Basically experts only do slightly better than random on predicting in their area of expertise.

What does Tetlock say about the utility of expert forecasting?

There are superforecasters, but they're not the pundits you see on TV. Superforecasting is a great book, see if your library has it.

From: https://ig.ft.com/sites/business-book-award/books/2015/longl...

In a landmark 20 year study, Professor Philip Tetlock showed that even the average expert was only slightly better at predicting the future than random guesswork. Tetlock’s latest project, an unprecedented government funded forecasting tournament involving over a million individual predictions has since shown that there are, however, some people with real demonstrable foresight.

It is absolutely normal and acceptable to talk about topics you don’t know about. If you are wrong, someone will tell you. If you are smart, you will learn from it better and faster than trying to study the topic yourself, because people who are familiar with the subject may know things you don’t know you need to know.

And of course sometimes being deeply involved makes experts less objective and outsider perspective may bring some fresh air to the conversation.

> why would you speak about a topic you know little about?

I have knowledge about adjacent topics. I add the caveat in case someone has a source that substantiates or refutes my hypothesis because I’m more interested in learning

Ok, thanks for answering.

I think it’s extremely common to be opinionated about things we don’t know much about. I don’t even know if that’s good or bad, I do find it interesting.

That's kind of how most things seem to be. People go about their lives and even if they have strong opinions about something like that, they probably aren't going to do much about it.

It makes sense to extrapolate based on what we know. In the US, the media and advocacy groups manufacture controversy and outrage. He's testing the possibility that maybe the same pattern applies there too.

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