Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

The claim that "expertise" is going by the wayside is absurd. What's gone by the wayside is the automatic acceptance of anything a self-proclaimed expert says as fact.

Yes, wide access to Google and Wikipedia have aided this trend, and raised the layperson's knowledge level. These things have also raised the burden of proof of expertise. I've never even heard of Tom Nichols; I'm not apt to take what he says as fact just because his blog says he's an expert in public policy.

I will, however, trust the opinion of e.g. Bruce Schneier because he has consistently demonstrated that he knows what he's talking about. If Tom Nichols aka Random McBlogger wants to be viewed as an expert, it's up to him to prove his expertise to his audience.

The first thing I did after reading this article was to google "Tom Nichols". The first few results were a horribly-amateurish blog, presumably by the same Tom Nichols (though no picture, so who knows?) and some wikipedia articles about a music producer and soccer player of the same name. As far as I can tell from a cursory google search, Tom Nichols is a nobody.

Apologies, but you're displaying precisely the kind of aggressive and arrogant ignorance that this article highlights.

You trust Bruce Schneier because he's a popular figure. You said it yourself: "Tom Nichols is a nobody" due to a fatal lack of PageRank not helped by a non-unique name. While I admire Schneier greatly and am thankful that there is somebody like him working to popularize cryptography, computer security, and related social issues, there are countless others equally or better qualified to speak out on topics of cryptographic theory whom you (and I) wouldn't recognize at all – but actual domain experts would.

I hope I do not really need to spell out why popularity contests in the court of public opinion are not a reliable avenue for deriving knowledge.

As for Tom Nichols?

> Thomas M. Nichols is a professor of national security affairs in the National Security Decision Making Department, where is also the Course Director for Security, Strategy, and Forces. A former Secretary of the Navy Fellow at the Naval War College, he previously taught international relations and Soviet/Russian affairs at Dartmouth College and Georgetown University. He is a former chairman of the Strategy and Policy Department at the Naval War College, for which he was awarded the Navy Civilian Meritorious Service Medal in 2005. He holds a PhD from Georgetown, an MA from Columbia University, the Certificate of the Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union at Columbia, and a BA from Boston University.

- http://www.usnwc.edu/Academics/Faculty/Thomas-M--Nichols,-Ph...

- http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/experts/1818/thomas_m_ni...

But hey, what worth is the combined judgment of the peers who bestowed these positions and honors upon Nichols, against the opinion of one armchair epistemologist on Hacker News who makes astute verdicts based upon the appearance of one's blog and how well one ranks on Google...

Bruce Schneier is more than a celebrity (though I did use him as an example because he's somewhat famous). He consults for Congress and is the author of multiple widely-used cryptographic algorithms (thinking here of Blow/twofish). He's an expert who also happens to be a celebrity, but I can still cite him as an expert without conflating the two.

>there are countless others equally or better qualified to speak out on topics of cryptographic theory whom you (and I) wouldn't recognize at all – but actual domain experts would.

If that's true, then I ought to be able to find talks these people have given, or papers they've written. Based on a quick google search, I concluded the author of this blog post appears to only write short, shallow blog posts.

Now, that might not be the case. You obviously dug a little deeper and found some more info. But that simply goes back to what I was saying in my previous comment. There is an increased burden of proof in a world where anyone can say anything on the internet. Nichols wrote a blog post claiming to be an expert? Okay, why is there no quick link to a summary of his qualifications in direct support of the article's central premise?

Who knows, maybe he's a public policy expert but a lousy writer.

Either way, my argument stands: On the internet, if you don't have name recognition and want to be taken seriously you have to demonstrate your expertise, because any layperson can quote a wiki article. It takes more than simply saying "I am an expert".

I agree that Schneier is clearly an expert; it's the way you've reached that conclusion which I disagree with, as it could easily lead you to the wrong answer in any case where celebrity and actual expertise are not so happily aligned.

> Based on a quick google search, I concluded the author of this blog post appears to only write short, shallow blog posts. [...] Okay, why is there no quick link to a summary of his qualifications in direct support of the article's central premise?

Well, there was this at the bottom of the article: "Tom Nichols is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct at the Harvard Extension School." Anybody interested in evaluating or expanding upon these credentials could do so with (not to be trite) a quick Google search.

> Either way, my argument stands: On the internet, if you don't have name recognition and want to be taken seriously you have to demonstrate your expertise, because any layperson can quote a wiki article. It takes more than simply saying "I am an expert".

Your mistake is to look for demonstrations of expertise in the form of Google rank and other manifestations of popularity. That's not what actual demonstration of expertise looks like. Laypeople like us (relative to the field of public policy) have two options for evaluating domain expertise: (1) expend the significant effort required to become actual experts in those fields ourselves, or (2) accept the collective opinion of the larger body of experts in that field. The latter generally takes the form of academic credentials, professional awards, CVs, and the like – and as undemocratic as it may feel to yield to the judgment of a bunch of ivory tower elites, as laypeople it's all we have to go by if we value truth.

PageRank is a popularity contest. It answers neither (1) nor (2) above.

>I agree that Schneier is clearly an expert; it's the way you've reached that conclusion which I disagree with, as it could easily lead you to the wrong answer in any case where celebrity and actual expertise are not so happily aligned.

I fail to see how; it's exceedingly rare to find true experts who haven't got publications of one sort or another to their name.

>Well, there was this at the bottom of the article: "Tom Nichols is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct at the Harvard Extension School." Anybody interested in evaluating or expanding upon these credentials could do so with (not to be trite) a quick Google search.

Well again, maybe he is an expert and merely a lousy writer. But none of this contradicts my point that his article's central premise (being an expert) needs to be clearly supported. That's like first-year undergraduate essay writing 101.

>Your mistake is to look for demonstrations of expertise in the form of Google rank and other manifestations of popularity. That's not what actual demonstration of expertise looks like.

Your mistake is interpreting what I wrote as conflating popularity with expertise. For the third time: I didn't choose Schneier as an example because he was popular. I stated outright my google search was cursory. You're missing the point.

You are dumb

Keep novelty accounts to reddit, please.

For chrissakes, you did not even carefully read the article, or you would have seen the paragraph @Niten linked. Bonus: there is another anecdote about his government service in the text of the article.

If you are not willing to read the article in which the author demonstrates his credibility, you have no standing to complain about it.

...and here is Mr. Nichols explaining why even if Iraq did eliminate it's (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction in 2003, the U.S. would've been right to invade because Saddam had been lying (about WMDs) and willing to invade his neighbors for so long:

http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/journal/17_1/rou...

Given that Iraq was a belligerent in both the Iran-Iraq war and Kuwaiti invasion, that's reasonable on it's face. Of course, that presumes you aren't aware the U.S. supported Iraq in the former (to the degree that we ignored the only successful missile attack on a U.S. ship in history), and said "we have no opinion" two months before the latter. I presume an "expert" on IR and national security would know both of those facts---so why make that claim? Regarding Iraqi deception about WMDs... well, we know how that one turned out, don't we?

There are conscientious members of every university's IR staff, but there are also plenty of cryptofacists and priests-for-hire giving the discipline a bad reputation. I certainly hope students challenge this kind of man's pronouncements, because they are better humans and better thinkers for doing so.

Excellent find, and part of why people can't always trust experts.

I think you're confusing a celebrity and an expert. Your primary care physician is an expert, but not a celebrity. We know that much because he is credentialed by a fairly reliable system. Celebrity status is simply one different way to ascertain expertise, and it's not that reliable - there are plenty of famous shamans, such as that guy with the debunked autism-vaccination link study.

That's apples to oranges. A physician goes through a rigorous training and licensing process before they can practice medicine. There's a base level of proficiency and ongoing continuing education requirements to be a physician. There is no such process for the nebulous and ill-defined field of "public policy" which could be stretched to cover just about any facet of daily life.

I therefore can only judge a self-proclaimed public policy expert based on what I can find about them. My cursory google search revealed no interesting papers written or talks given. Only a bunch of short, shallow blog posts.

Andrew Wakefield owns a patent on a single-measles vaccine, which would be a competitor to the MMR vaccine, and most people who are aware of that suspect that's why he published that shoddy nonsense about autism in the first place.

In other words, he is very much an expert on (at least) the vaccinations in his study. His celebrity came later.

He's salted the earth though - antivax crowd would denounce his vaccine with as much pique and passion as they have dished on MMR. It just doesn't look like a good business plan...

The anti-vaccination groups didn't exist at the time, so it's quite likely that Wakefield was just as startled by paranoiac monster he'd nurtured as anyone else. No member of the public (before or after Wakefield) actually knows anything about vaccines, other than the story about the Swine Flu vaccine killing more people than it saved... since any individual member of the public does not need to care about vaccines very often in their lifes, and therefore has little direct personal advantage in knowing more, vaccine safety is a very fragile exercise in blind trust.

Ironically, those who have lived and breathed vaccines for years (i.e. experts) seem to know nothing about that enormous trust placed in the vaccination process by the public---the public assumes it works and assumes it's there to keep you safe, but knows so little about them that even simple questions of safety will be translated into "vaccines bad."

The results are much better when searching for his full name used on his books: "Thomas M. Nichols"

So, you're dismissing his expertise and calling him names ("Random McBlogger") because Google ranks him more poorly for Tom than Thomas. That seems like a data-point which supports his argument quite well.

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