8 ms·

The Limits of Expertise

103 points by imartin2k 8y ago

sna1l 8y ago
The limits of expertise seem to be due to the lack of skin in the game for these so called experts. Source: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/beware-faux-experts-who-dont-pay-for-their-actions-nassim-taleb-says https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/beware-fau...
- Fricken 8y ago
  The executives at Blockbuster had skin in the game, they were experts, they got their asses kicked. Last election the Democrats had skin in the game, they were experts, they got their asses kicked. Recently the institutional Tesla shorts had skin in the game, they are experts, they got their asses kicked. So what does having skin in the game have to do with anything? Not much. I have a feeling you didn't read the article, though, because it goes off on a different tangent. It asks us to differentiate between experts in closed systems, such as engineers, pilots, and surgeons, whose expertise goes largely unchallenged, and experts in open systems, which are far more complex and unpredictable. The article suggests that anyone who claims to be an expert in an open system, and is self-assured in their expertise, is someone to be skeptical of. Open systems should be approached with humility. It's possible to be less wrong about the behaviors of open systems, but there's no reasonable expectation that you'll ever be right.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - sna1l 8y ago
    > The executives at Blockbuster had skin in the game, they were experts, they got their asses kicked. Last election the Democrats had skin in the game, they were experts, they got their asses kicked. Recently the institutional Tesla shorts had skin in the game, they are experts, they got their asses kicked. So what does having skin in the game have to do with anything? Not much. None of these examples show skin in the game. Executives at Blockbuster were almost all certainly wealthy prior to its demise, and its failure probably didn't affect their future earnings potential/job prospects. Institutional investors (non hedge fund) by definition have no skin in the game. Even by posting disappointing returns, a lot of their compensation is tied to a management fee, with future job prospects being lightly tied to prior returns. My argument is that all experts should be looked at skeptically. Without the proper incentives/punishments for incorrect predictions, it doesn't matter to said expert whether they are right or wrong. Even with the "closed system" experts, mistakes are made. In the article, the author talks about car engines as a closed system. So why have there been so many car recalls? Obviously expecting experts to be correct every single time is foolish, but my point is that for the most part, because the disincentive for an incorrect prediction is not proportional to the weight of the prediction, most expert claims should be taken skeptically.
    - kthejoker2 8y ago
      Ironically, I believe car engines and cars more broadly have become a much more "open system" due to all of the software and firmware and other technological advances in them.
  - whitepoplar 8y ago
    The point isn't that skin in the game causes better decision-making, the point is that the losers exit the gene pool. If you walk into any restaurant in the United States, you can bet the food is of better quality than that of a Soviet-era cafeteria. The difference? One group has skin in the game and must compete or die. One group doesn't. Skin in the game ensures the health of the restaurant industry (as measured by, say, quality of food), not the health of any one restaurant. As for your assertion re: experts in "closed" vs "open" systems, the issue is less one of "open" systems requiring humility, and more that "open" systems are statistically filled with BS artists. Why? Because they don't have the filtering mechanism that gets rid of those people. A fake dentist can't pull the wool over patients' eyes for long, but a macroeconomist can do just that for his entire career.
    - Fricken 8y ago
      People who have been 'weeded out of the gene pool' are non-experts. I don't classify them as experts to begin with. Even with open systems, to qualify as an expert in any sense, you need to have some kind of a track record, otherwise you're not an expert, you're just a bullshit artist, and your opinion is immaterial (immaterial to me at least, they may have a great deal of influence on others, which I guess is something that needs to be factored in to any predictions you make re: cult of Elon vs. Tesla shorts). Someone claiming to be an expert is not necessarily an expert, that's the first distinction that needs to be made.
    - mcguire 8y ago
      Are you asserting that all economists and financial goobs are "BS artists," or merely most? Is there a way to tell the difference better than "he hasn't gone belly up yet"?
      - Retra 8y ago
        They're only asserting that some economists could get away with being "BS artists," so inevitably, some do. Obviously that hurts the study of economics as a whole, because if you can get away with BS, that means people can't tell what is and is not BS, so non-BS looks like BS and has to compete on points other than merit.
  - extralego 8y ago
    You’re making unjust light of the phrase “skin in the game”. Your version is more like “potential monetary gains in the game”. To overlook the difference is to undermine the utility of the phrase. Simply, risking one’s own skin is anything but equivalent to risking potential monetary gains, and all the more so when the remainder of your life’s financial needs are secure and the profits at stake is mere bonus. My understanding of the Democrats in the last election is precisely that they were unwilling to have “skin in the game”. It appears that if they had embraced class politics, (the tradition of the American Democratic Party) the election would have been theirs. Because they were unwilling to take that risk, which so many with undeniable “skin in the game” demanded of them, they would have won. Or in other words, they did not have “skin in the game”. Maybe if such a risk were necessary to enter the race, they would have sat it out, in which case we could be quite certain.
    - Fricken 8y ago
      To make any claim at all you have at the very least wagered your integrity. At the other extreme you've got someone like the free soloist Alex Honnold, who wagers his life every time he scales a cliff without safety equipment. So what does 'skin in the game' even mean? It's kind of irrelevant. Although when Taleb talks about it, he makes it clear he refering largely to financial risk.
      - extralego 8y ago
        >So what does ‘skin in the game’ even mean? It’s kind of irrelevant. No it’s not. It’s precisely the topic of debate. I see where you’re coming from though. Your concern is with the author’s authority over the phrase, whereas mine is with the nature of the critique, namely the carelessness and inaccuracy resulting in it’s practice. I have never read this book, but it’s synopsis alludes no more than free market theory; numbingly basic material. Does this catch-phrase add anything to the argument? I cannot imagine how it would. This is nuance-free run-of-the-mill narcissist apologism as motivational speak. Don’t be fooled.
- andyidsinga 8y ago
  I think the point of the article doesn't have anything to do with skin in the game .. it has to do with which kind of system the expertise applies, and then how to value that expertise in light of that system. So, if its an open system (which I believe businesses are): value and encourage diverse expert viewpoints. What follows, if some level of success is attained, is a less dramatic fall into chaos of that open system.
rhapsodic 8y ago
This headline speaks for itself: > Ask Your Baby's Permission Before Changing Diaper, > Says Sexual Consent Expert[1] That person is what I would consider the opposite of an expert. [1] http://www.newsweek.com/diaper-ask-baby-permission-changing-says-sexual-consent-expert-918981 http://www.newsweek.com/diaper-ask-baby-permission-changing-...
- nine_k 8y ago
  The moment when a Newsweek headline cannot be told from a The Onion headline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
- vec 8y ago
  Wow, that is a crazy headline! I wonder what the article actually says? > “We work with parents from birth...Just about how to set up a culture of consent in their homes. ‘I’m going to change your nappy now, is that OK?’ Of course a baby’s not going to respond ‘yes mum, that’s awesome I’d love to have my nappy changed'. > "But if you leave a space and wait for body language and wait to make eye contact then you’re letting that child know that their response matters," she said. > [Snip] > Carson quoted statistics reflecting how common sexual abuse is among children, and said the work her organization does follows international best practice in abuse prevention. > "It teaches children their rights AND their responsibilities and connects them with people who care and can help. It invites their parents into the discussion and is sensitive to cultural and family values," she said. This seems ...honestly pretty reasonable and well thought out to me. You're right. The headline does speak for itself, because it certainly doesn't speak for the subject of the article.
  - RobertRoberts 8y ago
    I appreciate you looking at the article, but we should consider the effects headlines have on people. The intentions can't be dismissed just because the article is more reasonable than the headline.
  - rhapsodic 8y ago
    >> "It teaches children their rights AND their responsibilities and connects them with people who care and can help. It invites their parents into the discussion and is sensitive to cultural and family values," she said. > This seems ...honestly pretty reasonable and well thought out to me. As someone who has changed a few diapers in my day, it's one of the most idiotic things I've ever read.
ThomPete 8y ago
Experts know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing. Generalists know less and less about more and more until they know nothing about everything. The problem with using academic experts is that they are really just "historians" in the sense that they know what we know works and doesn't work or what is right or wrong. Most of them can't predict the future (which have a lot of radical uncertainty) they only know what has been the case for now and what might be but with a huge deal of uncertainty (economist are some of the worst offenders of this or more precisely politicians usage of economists) When it comes to politics/morals/geopolitics. No one is an expert other than those who actually make the decisions. You can be factually correct about why you make a decision and yet still make the wrong one. Technical experts are different as they are dealing with a solid foundation that doesn't include much radical uncertainty.
squozzer 8y ago
Part of the problem also seems to be the use of experts not to explain or even predict but to manipulate events and to hide downsides in service of that manipulation. E.g. Free trade - easy to love for consumers, economists, and people whose jobs aren't so easily transferable. Not so much for factory workers. The old jobs left, and the new ones which people were assured would materialize because of all of the new prosperity didn't. Another part of the problem seems to lie in skepticism and how to properly apply it. The closest I think anyone in the US comes to seeing a substantive debate is on the Sunday morning political shows and I'm sure it's still wrong, wrong, and wrong.
embulldogs99 8y ago
"suffice it to say, the complex manoeuvring of some extremely bright and learned people unwittingly triggered the financial crisis." So it wasnt the bad loans that were given to people who couldnt repay at variable interest rates prone for increases in the future? If everyone involved was truly educated, they likely would nothavs taken those loans in the first place... Dont confuse free market behavior (all people involved in the market) with that of a highly learned population
- otakucode 8y ago
  The financial crisis also wasn't very "unwitting." The banks knew that placing first large benefits to selling more loans, and then making it a requirement to remain employed would lead their employees to issue bad loans. They knew that loaning out 30x their capital was dangerous. They knew that when they reclassified garbage-class debt as AAA that they were lying through their teeth and were essentially guaranteeing a crash. But they also knew that they wouldn't bear the consequences for it. And they were right. The system in place makes it ideal optimal behavior to provoke such crashes for those involved in the financial services industry. It resulted in them receiving $1+ trillion, with nearly no change in regulation. When they want another trillion, they know they can count on getting it.
dilap 8y ago
I'm committing the sin of commenting w/o having read the article yet, so this might be duplicative or orthogonal, but: Without feedback, there is no real expertise. Most experts are in domains w/o feedback, so they are mostly full of shit. Good blog posts exploring this topic a bit: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/05/dominic-cummings-on-fighting-physics.html https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/05/dominic-cummings-on-fi... (above is a summary/intro to following:) https://dominiccummings.com/2018/05/22/effective-action-4a-expertise-from-fighting-and-physics-to-economics-politics-and-government/ https://dominiccummings.com/2018/05/22/effective-action-4a-e...
- nateabele 8y ago
  Yes! I did read the article, and was about to say something similar. The article makes the following argument: > In short, people value expertise in closed systems, but are distrustful of expertise in open systems. A typical example of a closed system would be a car engine or a knee joint. What about economics or investments? That's a massively open system on which people trust experts all the time. The true deciding factor is whether following (or rejecting) expert advice costs you something. If you have a brain tumor, an incompetent neurosurgeon is going to cost you a lot more than an incompetent president. In the parlance of Antifragile (which I cannot recommend highly enough for anyone who works with people & systems—so, most of us), the question turns on whether you have 'skin in the game'.
  - mcguire 8y ago
    "What about economics or investments?" Those are exactly the experts who are being most strongly questioned. They are the ones who predicted economic disaster from Brexit and Trump's bizarro-land policies, and yet the wheels have not come off. (Yet.) Therefore, they must not know what they're talking about, right?
- nateabele 8y ago
  It also occurs to me that there's an interesting meta-commentary here, which is that an outlet like Quillette can publish an article like this with such obvious counterarguments. They don't even have sufficient editorial feedback to understand that they don't understand.
lodi 8y ago
> Engineers, surgeons, pilots, all these kinds of ‘trusted’ experts operate in closed systems. Unfortunately, the prosperity of the "traditional medicine" industry is evidence that people don't even trust their surgeons/doctors.
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  Yes, I've absolutely lost trust in doctors and physicians. My wife suffered a minor knee injury while we were trail running last year. She went to a specialist (orthopedic surgeon) who performed an x-ray and told her he couldn't see any damage. He formally diagnosed the problem as chondromalacia patellae ("runner's knee") and sent her on her way with a cortisone shot and a referral to a physical therapy practice. As it happens, the cortisone shot significantly increased her discomfort and pain pretty much permanently. She was warned it might be more painful for two weeks, but she still has to ice it regularly. She also left the physical therapist she was referred to because the attentiveness and level of care was lacking (she was often left with an intern, and there was no itinerary for weekly progression to recovery). She didn't see any progress on twice weekly appointments. This left her pretty despondent, unfortunately. It wasn't until I went to several running subreddits and asked for strong recommendations for results-oriented physical therapists that we found a practice where she's actually seeing progress. After nearly a year she's just now starting to run again. Throughout this entire process, neither of us have felt particularly cared for or listened to. We're fortunate that we can spend the money on a place that doesn't accept any insurance just to see really strong care. What really drove me up a wall personally is that this level of expertise does exist. Professional athletes routinely recover from far more significant injuries because they're under the proper direction and recovery regimen. But that kind of expertise isn't easily available even if you know to look for it. Instead people get shuffled around from one crappy doctor's office to another by their uninterested insurance agency, until they gradually lose hope and stop bothering. Then they end up in they're late 30s and 40s unable to exercise because they got a bad whatever in their 20s that no one cared enough to help them through. It's also difficult to trust a profession which appears to systematically disrespect clients' time. This past week I had a morning appointment with my doctor. Despite arriving on time I didn't actually get to see him until two hours later. There's nothing I can really do about it, because I can't find any indication it will be like this until after experiencing it with a doctor. It's not as though this is an unsolved problem. Restaurants routinely plan to have reservations available on time so they're ready for guest arrival. I can recognize that doctors have much more domain knowledge and experience than I do. But that makes it even more grievous when I have to pick up their slack in patient care. The level of accountability and care seems to be completely hit or miss. EDIT: Thinking about it more, the article's premise about the trustworthiness of "closed-system experts" seems to be incorrect across the board. As an example, I once had a malfunctioning air conditioner that survived through two summers and three different mechanics. Apparently fixing a Honda Civic's air conditioner was too complex a task for their expertise. These days I just take my car to the dealership so I know it's fixed. I don't even mind overpaying as long as I don't have to deal with the anxiety of repeated disappointment. I can't imagine the desperation and anxiety of those who are at the mercy of these kinds of experts for much more serious problems. That kind of frustration is how you create supervillains.
smacktoward 8y ago
> Nobody says, “I want someone unqualified to be my president, therefore I also want someone unqualified to be my surgeon.” Nobody doubts the value of the expertise of an engineer or a pilot. If planes were crashing every other day, you'd better believe people would be doubting pilots. Trust is earned, not owed. And the reason people have trouble trusting our political and economic elites is because they keep crashing the damn plane.
- s3m4j 8y ago
  That's almost a rhetorical question, but... How do you define "crashing the plane" here ? There's only one plane and it's still going. History hasn't ended.
  - mirceal 8y ago
    I think it's more like having a terrible experience when flying than a plane crash. If planes would somewhat function but 10 people would be kicked of the plane an beaten to death for each flight one would argue that people would quickly lose their trust in the airlines.
  - rsj_hn 8y ago
    There is a way to measure economic and political performance other than "I have not yet annihilated the planet" -- I mean, that's a pretty low bar. In Italy, GDP per capita is below what it was since the Euro was introduced[1] in 2000. In the U.S., In 2014 the middle class was poorer than it was in 1989[2]. Real median household income has been flat for since 1965, increasing by only $4000 in chained 2016 dollars over that 50 year period[3], whereas the costs of necessities such as housing, college tuition, and healthcare have gone up much faster than income, creating a lot of anxiety. When things get better for a majority of the people (rather than just for the top), the population is happy with their leadership. When there is a record of failure, then cries of "well, we didn't kill off all life on earth" and "we are experts" are not well received as reasons to keep the current regime in power. [1]https://tradingeconomics.com/italy/gdp-per-capita https://tradingeconomics.com/italy/gdp-per-capita [2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/01/the-middle-class-is-poorer-today-than-it-was-in-1989/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.47178ce86b11 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/01/the-m... [3] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2017/09/19/u-s-household-incomes-a-50-year-perspective https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2017/09/1...
dabbledash 8y ago
I don’t think I buy the author’s explanation, at least not entirely. There are a lot people who don’t respect expertise on things like vaccination. People have a hard time accepting expertise when the claims of experts are probabilistic instead of definitive. (Because they will perceive experts as wrong when <50% probability things do happen or >50% things don’t happen. And they will see the experts as wishy washy in any case.) People have a hard time accepting expertise when the claims of experts are inconsistent with philosophical or political positions that are core to people’s identities.
otakucode 8y ago
Anti-intellectualism has been on the rise since World War I. It's not about to stop any time soon without some seriously large-scale event. Prior to WWI everyone figured science and reason were purely good. WWI showed them this was not the case, as it created mustard gas, tanks, etc. That sort of cracked the social conception a bit. The concentration camps and the Holocaust after World War II burst that crack wide open. Eugenics was held up as a purely rational approach to improving human life, remember. So it's failure was seen as a failure of rationalism and science (it actually wasn't, people were just cutting corners and over-extending their observations in invalid ways). The 20th century continued on like this, people cutting corners and slacking off on scientific rigor, it causing widespread suffering, then that suffering being laid at the feet of science for not stopping it. Thalidomide, leaded gasoline, lead paint, Agent Orange, atomic weapons, failure of centrally planned governance, the list goes on. Somewhere along the way, the discussion ended. Reason and science lost. It was long enough ago that everything we produce today is produced from a fundamental place that begins with an opposition to intellectualism and proceeds from there. Just try to find a TV show or movie or other creative work that doesn't have anti-intellectualism already accepted as being as evidently true as gravity. You won't be able to do it, at least not in terms of Western media. I've seen a couple movies from India, strangely enough, that actually beg a discussion about it, but it comes across as very strange to a western mind. Scientists and those who pursue reason are cold, detached, calculating, uncaring, socially awkward, arrogant, etc. They're not what you want your children to grow up to be. So they're certainly not who you want making decisions that govern how you live, what your taxes are spent on, etc. Even our most "science positive" media, science fiction, is nothing but a cavalcade of purportedly reason-driven characters leading people into danger through their hubris, only to be saved at the last moment by a gun-toting musclebound hero who tells the scientist to shut up and 'follows his heart.' That is the core of lay anti-intellectualism. If you want to have friends, a loving family, be connected to your community, be a caring, moral person... you can't guide your life with reason and science. That's the foundational principle. There is some incorrect supposition that love is irrational, that being kind is irrational, that science can't convey value to social utility alongside other types of utility, etc. The way I see it, this is the biggest problem facing the human species. And it might not even have a solution. It might be a flaw in the idea of civilization. You create a civilization to remove danger from peoples lives. Danger which created the impetus and desperation great enough to abandon intuition and trust reason in the first place. So by civilizing, you guarantee those protected by its umbrella will come to devalue it and distrust it. They will fail to maintain and expand it. Once it begins to fall, most would think there might be reconsideration. I disagree. I think it will simply accelerate the fall. Seeing danger re-assert itself, the response will be to double-down on intuition, that it is the remaining pieces of infrastructure that endanger them and that they haven't gone far enough. Eventually, we revert to the 'default state' of humanity - slogging through the mud, racked with disease, bludgeoning each other to death over whose god is stronger.
throw2016 8y ago
You must differentiate technical and scientific expertise from things like economic theorizing. You can't build a bridge without expertise or a car or a plane. Those need serious expertise, experience and certainty of the 1+1=2 variety. No one is questioning this expertise. But things like economics, what are they experts in? In the general markets, stock markets, free markets, policy, risk, trade, banking, money, human behavior? They seem to lack an understanding of why things happen, and yet are happy to make sweeping judgements that seem to push very specific ideologies based on dubious assumptions of human behavior. And here is the problem, nothing in their course material make them experts in human behavior. This is what is causing the public loss of confidence along with the media and think tanks who push these narratives. And the economics profession at the moment is going through a crisis of confidence, a lot of the models have been revealed to be based on completely unrealistic assumptions, data is fudged, and things like GDP, globalization and the neoliberal ideology that have been pushed as 'unquestioned truth' are now under the scanner.
EADGBE 8y ago
All hail general-ism! It works well for most things. Around the house, I generally have an idea of how to fix things. I only know enough to know when I should call an expert. It saves a ton of money. I'd like to consider myself a generalist web developer too, able to build infrastructure from the ground up, set up the DB, Get a backend API, get some pages going, etc. I won't pretend I know more about Angular/Java/MySQL/CI than you. But I'm open to how experts do this stuff. I just like learning, and I enjoy grasping the big concepts more than the minute stuff. I'm really going places, I tell you. I've got upper management written all over me.
andyidsinga 8y ago
THIS : > However, it is worth drawing a distinction between these two types of expertise—the kind people question, and the kind people don’t. In short, people value expertise in closed systems, but are distrustful of expertise in open systems.
andyidsinga 8y ago
I would add to the list of open systems that are impossible to control, predict and eventually unravel in the face of chaos: businesses
keenboy 8y ago
One other important consideration... By stating that we're sick of experts the author implies that we don't trust them. It's important to recognize that there are two sides to trust. 1) are they competent 2) do they have integrity Many of the examples in the article are failures of integrity, not failures of competence (Wall Street investors, Facebook, etc.). This suggests that the core issue may be lack of ethics/morals rather than lack of expertise.

103 points by imartin2k 8y ago

The limits of expertise seem to be due to the lack of skin in the game for these so called experts. Source: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/beware-faux-experts-who-dont-pay-for-their-actions-nassim-taleb-says https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/beware-fau...

Fricken 8y ago
The executives at Blockbuster had skin in the game, they were experts, they got their asses kicked. Last election the Democrats had skin in the game, they were experts, they got their asses kicked. Recently the institutional Tesla shorts had skin in the game, they are experts, they got their asses kicked. So what does having skin in the game have to do with anything? Not much. I have a feeling you didn't read the article, though, because it goes off on a different tangent. It asks us to differentiate between experts in closed systems, such as engineers, pilots, and surgeons, whose expertise goes largely unchallenged, and experts in open systems, which are far more complex and unpredictable. The article suggests that anyone who claims to be an expert in an open system, and is self-assured in their expertise, is someone to be skeptical of. Open systems should be approached with humility. It's possible to be less wrong about the behaviors of open systems, but there's no reasonable expectation that you'll ever be right.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- sna1l 8y ago
  > The executives at Blockbuster had skin in the game, they were experts, they got their asses kicked. Last election the Democrats had skin in the game, they were experts, they got their asses kicked. Recently the institutional Tesla shorts had skin in the game, they are experts, they got their asses kicked. So what does having skin in the game have to do with anything? Not much. None of these examples show skin in the game. Executives at Blockbuster were almost all certainly wealthy prior to its demise, and its failure probably didn't affect their future earnings potential/job prospects. Institutional investors (non hedge fund) by definition have no skin in the game. Even by posting disappointing returns, a lot of their compensation is tied to a management fee, with future job prospects being lightly tied to prior returns. My argument is that all experts should be looked at skeptically. Without the proper incentives/punishments for incorrect predictions, it doesn't matter to said expert whether they are right or wrong. Even with the "closed system" experts, mistakes are made. In the article, the author talks about car engines as a closed system. So why have there been so many car recalls? Obviously expecting experts to be correct every single time is foolish, but my point is that for the most part, because the disincentive for an incorrect prediction is not proportional to the weight of the prediction, most expert claims should be taken skeptically.
  - kthejoker2 8y ago
    Ironically, I believe car engines and cars more broadly have become a much more "open system" due to all of the software and firmware and other technological advances in them.
- whitepoplar 8y ago
  The point isn't that skin in the game causes better decision-making, the point is that the losers exit the gene pool. If you walk into any restaurant in the United States, you can bet the food is of better quality than that of a Soviet-era cafeteria. The difference? One group has skin in the game and must compete or die. One group doesn't. Skin in the game ensures the health of the restaurant industry (as measured by, say, quality of food), not the health of any one restaurant. As for your assertion re: experts in "closed" vs "open" systems, the issue is less one of "open" systems requiring humility, and more that "open" systems are statistically filled with BS artists. Why? Because they don't have the filtering mechanism that gets rid of those people. A fake dentist can't pull the wool over patients' eyes for long, but a macroeconomist can do just that for his entire career.
  - Fricken 8y ago
    People who have been 'weeded out of the gene pool' are non-experts. I don't classify them as experts to begin with. Even with open systems, to qualify as an expert in any sense, you need to have some kind of a track record, otherwise you're not an expert, you're just a bullshit artist, and your opinion is immaterial (immaterial to me at least, they may have a great deal of influence on others, which I guess is something that needs to be factored in to any predictions you make re: cult of Elon vs. Tesla shorts). Someone claiming to be an expert is not necessarily an expert, that's the first distinction that needs to be made.
  - mcguire 8y ago
    Are you asserting that all economists and financial goobs are "BS artists," or merely most? Is there a way to tell the difference better than "he hasn't gone belly up yet"?
    - Retra 8y ago
      They're only asserting that some economists could get away with being "BS artists," so inevitably, some do. Obviously that hurts the study of economics as a whole, because if you can get away with BS, that means people can't tell what is and is not BS, so non-BS looks like BS and has to compete on points other than merit.
- extralego 8y ago
  You’re making unjust light of the phrase “skin in the game”. Your version is more like “potential monetary gains in the game”. To overlook the difference is to undermine the utility of the phrase. Simply, risking one’s own skin is anything but equivalent to risking potential monetary gains, and all the more so when the remainder of your life’s financial needs are secure and the profits at stake is mere bonus. My understanding of the Democrats in the last election is precisely that they were unwilling to have “skin in the game”. It appears that if they had embraced class politics, (the tradition of the American Democratic Party) the election would have been theirs. Because they were unwilling to take that risk, which so many with undeniable “skin in the game” demanded of them, they would have won. Or in other words, they did not have “skin in the game”. Maybe if such a risk were necessary to enter the race, they would have sat it out, in which case we could be quite certain.
  - Fricken 8y ago
    To make any claim at all you have at the very least wagered your integrity. At the other extreme you've got someone like the free soloist Alex Honnold, who wagers his life every time he scales a cliff without safety equipment. So what does 'skin in the game' even mean? It's kind of irrelevant. Although when Taleb talks about it, he makes it clear he refering largely to financial risk.
    - extralego 8y ago
      >So what does ‘skin in the game’ even mean? It’s kind of irrelevant. No it’s not. It’s precisely the topic of debate. I see where you’re coming from though. Your concern is with the author’s authority over the phrase, whereas mine is with the nature of the critique, namely the carelessness and inaccuracy resulting in it’s practice. I have never read this book, but it’s synopsis alludes no more than free market theory; numbingly basic material. Does this catch-phrase add anything to the argument? I cannot imagine how it would. This is nuance-free run-of-the-mill narcissist apologism as motivational speak. Don’t be fooled.
andyidsinga 8y ago
I think the point of the article doesn't have anything to do with skin in the game .. it has to do with which kind of system the expertise applies, and then how to value that expertise in light of that system. So, if its an open system (which I believe businesses are): value and encourage diverse expert viewpoints. What follows, if some level of success is attained, is a less dramatic fall into chaos of that open system.

rhapsodic 8y ago

This headline speaks for itself: > Ask Your Baby's Permission Before Changing Diaper, > Says Sexual Consent Expert[1] That person is what I would consider the opposite of an expert. [1] http://www.newsweek.com/diaper-ask-baby-permission-changing-says-sexual-consent-expert-918981 http://www.newsweek.com/diaper-ask-baby-permission-changing-...

nine_k 8y ago
The moment when a Newsweek headline cannot be told from a The Onion headline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
vec 8y ago
Wow, that is a crazy headline! I wonder what the article actually says? > “We work with parents from birth...Just about how to set up a culture of consent in their homes. ‘I’m going to change your nappy now, is that OK?’ Of course a baby’s not going to respond ‘yes mum, that’s awesome I’d love to have my nappy changed'. > "But if you leave a space and wait for body language and wait to make eye contact then you’re letting that child know that their response matters," she said. > [Snip] > Carson quoted statistics reflecting how common sexual abuse is among children, and said the work her organization does follows international best practice in abuse prevention. > "It teaches children their rights AND their responsibilities and connects them with people who care and can help. It invites their parents into the discussion and is sensitive to cultural and family values," she said. This seems ...honestly pretty reasonable and well thought out to me. You're right. The headline does speak for itself, because it certainly doesn't speak for the subject of the article.
- RobertRoberts 8y ago
  I appreciate you looking at the article, but we should consider the effects headlines have on people. The intentions can't be dismissed just because the article is more reasonable than the headline.
- rhapsodic 8y ago
  >> "It teaches children their rights AND their responsibilities and connects them with people who care and can help. It invites their parents into the discussion and is sensitive to cultural and family values," she said. > This seems ...honestly pretty reasonable and well thought out to me. As someone who has changed a few diapers in my day, it's one of the most idiotic things I've ever read.

ThomPete 8y ago

Experts know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing. Generalists know less and less about more and more until they know nothing about everything. The problem with using academic experts is that they are really just "historians" in the sense that they know what we know works and doesn't work or what is right or wrong. Most of them can't predict the future (which have a lot of radical uncertainty) they only know what has been the case for now and what might be but with a huge deal of uncertainty (economist are some of the worst offenders of this or more precisely politicians usage of economists) When it comes to politics/morals/geopolitics. No one is an expert other than those who actually make the decisions. You can be factually correct about why you make a decision and yet still make the wrong one. Technical experts are different as they are dealing with a solid foundation that doesn't include much radical uncertainty.

squozzer 8y ago

Part of the problem also seems to be the use of experts not to explain or even predict but to manipulate events and to hide downsides in service of that manipulation. E.g. Free trade - easy to love for consumers, economists, and people whose jobs aren't so easily transferable. Not so much for factory workers. The old jobs left, and the new ones which people were assured would materialize because of all of the new prosperity didn't. Another part of the problem seems to lie in skepticism and how to properly apply it. The closest I think anyone in the US comes to seeing a substantive debate is on the Sunday morning political shows and I'm sure it's still wrong, wrong, and wrong.

embulldogs99 8y ago

"suffice it to say, the complex manoeuvring of some extremely bright and learned people unwittingly triggered the financial crisis." So it wasnt the bad loans that were given to people who couldnt repay at variable interest rates prone for increases in the future? If everyone involved was truly educated, they likely would nothavs taken those loans in the first place... Dont confuse free market behavior (all people involved in the market) with that of a highly learned population

otakucode 8y ago
The financial crisis also wasn't very "unwitting." The banks knew that placing first large benefits to selling more loans, and then making it a requirement to remain employed would lead their employees to issue bad loans. They knew that loaning out 30x their capital was dangerous. They knew that when they reclassified garbage-class debt as AAA that they were lying through their teeth and were essentially guaranteeing a crash. But they also knew that they wouldn't bear the consequences for it. And they were right. The system in place makes it ideal optimal behavior to provoke such crashes for those involved in the financial services industry. It resulted in them receiving $1+ trillion, with nearly no change in regulation. When they want another trillion, they know they can count on getting it.

dilap 8y ago

I'm committing the sin of commenting w/o having read the article yet, so this might be duplicative or orthogonal, but: Without feedback, there is no real expertise. Most experts are in domains w/o feedback, so they are mostly full of shit. Good blog posts exploring this topic a bit: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/05/dominic-cummings-on-fighting-physics.html https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/05/dominic-cummings-on-fi... (above is a summary/intro to following:) https://dominiccummings.com/2018/05/22/effective-action-4a-expertise-from-fighting-and-physics-to-economics-politics-and-government/ https://dominiccummings.com/2018/05/22/effective-action-4a-e...

nateabele 8y ago
Yes! I did read the article, and was about to say something similar. The article makes the following argument: > In short, people value expertise in closed systems, but are distrustful of expertise in open systems. A typical example of a closed system would be a car engine or a knee joint. What about economics or investments? That's a massively open system on which people trust experts all the time. The true deciding factor is whether following (or rejecting) expert advice costs you something. If you have a brain tumor, an incompetent neurosurgeon is going to cost you a lot more than an incompetent president. In the parlance of Antifragile (which I cannot recommend highly enough for anyone who works with people & systems—so, most of us), the question turns on whether you have 'skin in the game'.
- mcguire 8y ago
  "What about economics or investments?" Those are exactly the experts who are being most strongly questioned. They are the ones who predicted economic disaster from Brexit and Trump's bizarro-land policies, and yet the wheels have not come off. (Yet.) Therefore, they must not know what they're talking about, right?
nateabele 8y ago
It also occurs to me that there's an interesting meta-commentary here, which is that an outlet like Quillette can publish an article like this with such obvious counterarguments. They don't even have sufficient editorial feedback to understand that they don't understand.

lodi 8y ago

> Engineers, surgeons, pilots, all these kinds of ‘trusted’ experts operate in closed systems. Unfortunately, the prosperity of the "traditional medicine" industry is evidence that people don't even trust their surgeons/doctors.

throwawaymath 8y ago
Yes, I've absolutely lost trust in doctors and physicians. My wife suffered a minor knee injury while we were trail running last year. She went to a specialist (orthopedic surgeon) who performed an x-ray and told her he couldn't see any damage. He formally diagnosed the problem as chondromalacia patellae ("runner's knee") and sent her on her way with a cortisone shot and a referral to a physical therapy practice. As it happens, the cortisone shot significantly increased her discomfort and pain pretty much permanently. She was warned it might be more painful for two weeks, but she still has to ice it regularly. She also left the physical therapist she was referred to because the attentiveness and level of care was lacking (she was often left with an intern, and there was no itinerary for weekly progression to recovery). She didn't see any progress on twice weekly appointments. This left her pretty despondent, unfortunately. It wasn't until I went to several running subreddits and asked for strong recommendations for results-oriented physical therapists that we found a practice where she's actually seeing progress. After nearly a year she's just now starting to run again. Throughout this entire process, neither of us have felt particularly cared for or listened to. We're fortunate that we can spend the money on a place that doesn't accept any insurance just to see really strong care. What really drove me up a wall personally is that this level of expertise does exist. Professional athletes routinely recover from far more significant injuries because they're under the proper direction and recovery regimen. But that kind of expertise isn't easily available even if you know to look for it. Instead people get shuffled around from one crappy doctor's office to another by their uninterested insurance agency, until they gradually lose hope and stop bothering. Then they end up in they're late 30s and 40s unable to exercise because they got a bad whatever in their 20s that no one cared enough to help them through. It's also difficult to trust a profession which appears to systematically disrespect clients' time. This past week I had a morning appointment with my doctor. Despite arriving on time I didn't actually get to see him until two hours later. There's nothing I can really do about it, because I can't find any indication it will be like this until after experiencing it with a doctor. It's not as though this is an unsolved problem. Restaurants routinely plan to have reservations available on time so they're ready for guest arrival. I can recognize that doctors have much more domain knowledge and experience than I do. But that makes it even more grievous when I have to pick up their slack in patient care. The level of accountability and care seems to be completely hit or miss. EDIT: Thinking about it more, the article's premise about the trustworthiness of "closed-system experts" seems to be incorrect across the board. As an example, I once had a malfunctioning air conditioner that survived through two summers and three different mechanics. Apparently fixing a Honda Civic's air conditioner was too complex a task for their expertise. These days I just take my car to the dealership so I know it's fixed. I don't even mind overpaying as long as I don't have to deal with the anxiety of repeated disappointment. I can't imagine the desperation and anxiety of those who are at the mercy of these kinds of experts for much more serious problems. That kind of frustration is how you create supervillains.

smacktoward 8y ago

> Nobody says, “I want someone unqualified to be my president, therefore I also want someone unqualified to be my surgeon.” Nobody doubts the value of the expertise of an engineer or a pilot. If planes were crashing every other day, you'd better believe people would be doubting pilots. Trust is earned, not owed. And the reason people have trouble trusting our political and economic elites is because they keep crashing the damn plane.

s3m4j 8y ago
That's almost a rhetorical question, but... How do you define "crashing the plane" here ? There's only one plane and it's still going. History hasn't ended.
- mirceal 8y ago
  I think it's more like having a terrible experience when flying than a plane crash. If planes would somewhat function but 10 people would be kicked of the plane an beaten to death for each flight one would argue that people would quickly lose their trust in the airlines.
- rsj_hn 8y ago
  There is a way to measure economic and political performance other than "I have not yet annihilated the planet" -- I mean, that's a pretty low bar. In Italy, GDP per capita is below what it was since the Euro was introduced[1] in 2000. In the U.S., In 2014 the middle class was poorer than it was in 1989[2]. Real median household income has been flat for since 1965, increasing by only $4000 in chained 2016 dollars over that 50 year period[3], whereas the costs of necessities such as housing, college tuition, and healthcare have gone up much faster than income, creating a lot of anxiety. When things get better for a majority of the people (rather than just for the top), the population is happy with their leadership. When there is a record of failure, then cries of "well, we didn't kill off all life on earth" and "we are experts" are not well received as reasons to keep the current regime in power. [1]https://tradingeconomics.com/italy/gdp-per-capita https://tradingeconomics.com/italy/gdp-per-capita [2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/01/the-middle-class-is-poorer-today-than-it-was-in-1989/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.47178ce86b11 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/01/the-m... [3] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2017/09/19/u-s-household-incomes-a-50-year-perspective https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2017/09/1...

dabbledash 8y ago

I don’t think I buy the author’s explanation, at least not entirely. There are a lot people who don’t respect expertise on things like vaccination. People have a hard time accepting expertise when the claims of experts are probabilistic instead of definitive. (Because they will perceive experts as wrong when <50% probability things do happen or >50% things don’t happen. And they will see the experts as wishy washy in any case.) People have a hard time accepting expertise when the claims of experts are inconsistent with philosophical or political positions that are core to people’s identities.

otakucode 8y ago

Anti-intellectualism has been on the rise since World War I. It's not about to stop any time soon without some seriously large-scale event. Prior to WWI everyone figured science and reason were purely good. WWI showed them this was not the case, as it created mustard gas, tanks, etc. That sort of cracked the social conception a bit. The concentration camps and the Holocaust after World War II burst that crack wide open. Eugenics was held up as a purely rational approach to improving human life, remember. So it's failure was seen as a failure of rationalism and science (it actually wasn't, people were just cutting corners and over-extending their observations in invalid ways). The 20th century continued on like this, people cutting corners and slacking off on scientific rigor, it causing widespread suffering, then that suffering being laid at the feet of science for not stopping it. Thalidomide, leaded gasoline, lead paint, Agent Orange, atomic weapons, failure of centrally planned governance, the list goes on. Somewhere along the way, the discussion ended. Reason and science lost. It was long enough ago that everything we produce today is produced from a fundamental place that begins with an opposition to intellectualism and proceeds from there. Just try to find a TV show or movie or other creative work that doesn't have anti-intellectualism already accepted as being as evidently true as gravity. You won't be able to do it, at least not in terms of Western media. I've seen a couple movies from India, strangely enough, that actually beg a discussion about it, but it comes across as very strange to a western mind. Scientists and those who pursue reason are cold, detached, calculating, uncaring, socially awkward, arrogant, etc. They're not what you want your children to grow up to be. So they're certainly not who you want making decisions that govern how you live, what your taxes are spent on, etc. Even our most "science positive" media, science fiction, is nothing but a cavalcade of purportedly reason-driven characters leading people into danger through their hubris, only to be saved at the last moment by a gun-toting musclebound hero who tells the scientist to shut up and 'follows his heart.' That is the core of lay anti-intellectualism. If you want to have friends, a loving family, be connected to your community, be a caring, moral person... you can't guide your life with reason and science. That's the foundational principle. There is some incorrect supposition that love is irrational, that being kind is irrational, that science can't convey value to social utility alongside other types of utility, etc. The way I see it, this is the biggest problem facing the human species. And it might not even have a solution. It might be a flaw in the idea of civilization. You create a civilization to remove danger from peoples lives. Danger which created the impetus and desperation great enough to abandon intuition and trust reason in the first place. So by civilizing, you guarantee those protected by its umbrella will come to devalue it and distrust it. They will fail to maintain and expand it. Once it begins to fall, most would think there might be reconsideration. I disagree. I think it will simply accelerate the fall. Seeing danger re-assert itself, the response will be to double-down on intuition, that it is the remaining pieces of infrastructure that endanger them and that they haven't gone far enough. Eventually, we revert to the 'default state' of humanity - slogging through the mud, racked with disease, bludgeoning each other to death over whose god is stronger.

throw2016 8y ago

You must differentiate technical and scientific expertise from things like economic theorizing. You can't build a bridge without expertise or a car or a plane. Those need serious expertise, experience and certainty of the 1+1=2 variety. No one is questioning this expertise. But things like economics, what are they experts in? In the general markets, stock markets, free markets, policy, risk, trade, banking, money, human behavior? They seem to lack an understanding of why things happen, and yet are happy to make sweeping judgements that seem to push very specific ideologies based on dubious assumptions of human behavior. And here is the problem, nothing in their course material make them experts in human behavior. This is what is causing the public loss of confidence along with the media and think tanks who push these narratives. And the economics profession at the moment is going through a crisis of confidence, a lot of the models have been revealed to be based on completely unrealistic assumptions, data is fudged, and things like GDP, globalization and the neoliberal ideology that have been pushed as 'unquestioned truth' are now under the scanner.

EADGBE 8y ago

All hail general-ism! It works well for most things. Around the house, I generally have an idea of how to fix things. I only know enough to know when I should call an expert. It saves a ton of money. I'd like to consider myself a generalist web developer too, able to build infrastructure from the ground up, set up the DB, Get a backend API, get some pages going, etc. I won't pretend I know more about Angular/Java/MySQL/CI than you. But I'm open to how experts do this stuff. I just like learning, and I enjoy grasping the big concepts more than the minute stuff. I'm really going places, I tell you. I've got upper management written all over me.

andyidsinga 8y ago

THIS : > However, it is worth drawing a distinction between these two types of expertise—the kind people question, and the kind people don’t. In short, people value expertise in closed systems, but are distrustful of expertise in open systems.

andyidsinga 8y ago

I would add to the list of open systems that are impossible to control, predict and eventually unravel in the face of chaos: businesses

keenboy 8y ago

One other important consideration... By stating that we're sick of experts the author implies that we don't trust them. It's important to recognize that there are two sides to trust. 1) are they competent 2) do they have integrity Many of the examples in the article are failures of integrity, not failures of competence (Wall Street investors, Facebook, etc.). This suggests that the core issue may be lack of ethics/morals rather than lack of expertise.