Hacker News Reader

Comment by KingMob | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com