3 ms·
> But by dismissing anything not written by an "expert", you're making the exact same mistake. Uh, no. You're simply favouring people who have dedicated their
by fao_ 9y ago
> But by dismissing anything not written by an "expert", you're making the exact same mistake.
Uh, no. You're simply favouring people who have dedicated their lives to studying and researching something, over people who had a spare month and thought "You know what? I'd love to write an article over something I know absolutely nothing about".
I love to read about amateurs and autodidacts as much as the next person on HN, but the simple truth is that most people talking about a field, who have not majored in it, are not going to be either of those people. Autodidacts who put the effort in are rare these days, what is significantly less rare are people who write articles about a subject, who haven't read even the basic texts on said subject.
This is true even for specialists who are majored in another field, such as: Stephen Hawking, Stephen Wolfram, Elon Musk (Although I admit it is dubious to think of a CEO as a specialist in this sense), and now Garry Kasparov. Rationalwiki has a list dedicated to people who are Nobel prize winners in on field, talking absolute bullshit about another field: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nobel_disease http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nobel_disease (That is, bullshit in the sense of nonsense, not in the insult sense).
Actually, I would probably go so far as to say that this attitude is strictly against autodidacticism, because where autodidacts favour knowledge about a subject, the other favours arguments from authority and complacence of thought.
- opportune 9y agoYou put it better than I did. I would liken the current media frenzy over AI to past media frenzies over quantum mechanics. There's an overabundance of non-experts giving incorrect or overly philosophical opinions on the field. These often lead readers with no background on the subject with incorrect assumptions on the matter (e.g. "quantum mechanics means consciousness is a quantifiable physical phenomenon").
- ZenoArrow 9y ago> "Uh, no. You're simply favouring people who have dedicated their lives to studying and researching something, over people who had a spare month and thought "You know what? I'd love to write an article over something I know absolutely nothing about"." Do you not think the people that have dedicated their lives to studying AI are likely to be more optimistic about its uses than the population at large? I dislike the 'opinions as news' trend on the whole, but there is room in public debates for non-experts in a specific field. The knowledge required to develop the technology is different from the knowledge needed to be able to engage in debates about its uses. AI has the power to take jobs away from humans. This is not a controversial view, mainly because it's already happened (such as in car manufacturing). In my opinion, there's not enough debate about the implications of the increasing sophistication of AI (not enough debate amongst the general population, there's plenty in tech circles).