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What would be productive is discussing the expertise of the author, or if you don't think that's of interest, not discussing it at all. I notice you posted the
by forapurpose 8y ago
What would be productive is discussing the expertise of the author, or if you don't think that's of interest, not discussing it at all. I notice you posted the original article; I'm not criticizing you for posting it but perhaps this is getting personal?
Insulting commenters with derogatory names is unwelcome and lowers the quality of discussion; I don't care if you have a link to it. Tangentially, it is a good example of how even the smallest behavior by a leader, such as pg, set a norm for many followers: people are digging up his posts 6 years later like they are scripture - wisdom, law and conduct to study. pg is just a person, not a prophet; YC and HN are wonderful, but his every act is not wisdom or law. (No insult to pg; the same could be said of Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs, and everyone else who ever worked in SV or lived on Earth, including me.)
> Credentials != expertise (one can be an expert by self-studying, in fact in CS many are)
Credentials are a strong, widely used sign of expertise. The CS experts who lack educational credentials are practitioners, professionals in the field; they have other credentials. The author is neither educated in the field nor is a professional or practitioner in it. Everyone else weighs those things heavily. Do you hire or take the advice of people with neither education nor experience in the domain?
The article in particular requires expertise: It's a series of rules of thumb, things that are gained only through extensive experience doing the task described. And it requires doing it with success - not all experience is good experience - and apply good analysis to that experience. Rules of thumb for physics research from someone who washed out are not the same as those from Stephen Hawking; how about rules of thumb from someone who never has studied nor practiced physics, but read some links? Again, if they wrote 'rules of thumb for evaluating code' on the same basis, it would be ridiculous.
In general, everyone knows that the Internet is full of people spewing nonsense they know nothing about, but even smart people often seem to fail to apply that to particular instances, especially when other psychological drives apply - such as when what is said moves or inflames them. The downvotes and criticisms (this is an observation, not a complaint) seem to be because my comment disrupts that drive (in this case, the inflammatory narrative about social sciences). That's ok and what I expected. My prediction is that if I wrote the same about a different topic, then the response would be different: If what I wrote agreed with the crowd (e.g., if the author said psychological research was high quality and I questioned their expertise), then I'd expect many to agree with me, but for the same bad reason. Inflammatory stuff is, disappointingly, still hard to talk about rationally.
- coldtea 8y ago>I notice you posted the original article; I'm not criticizing you for posting it but perhaps this is getting personal? No, but the above is an attempt of second-guessing my psychology (and also irrelevant). Now, you follow with a long list of opinions of the importance of credentials. What I don't see is any opinion on why the particular arguments are not enough. Can you enlighten us? You could point to someone with credentials which refutes them for example. If you just want to raise a general principle (totally unrelated to the quality or not of the arguments in TFA) then it seems that you suggest that we should only discuss articles written by people with credentials on a topic. If so, why should we accept this suggestion of yours then? Where are your credentials on epistemology (seeing that this is an epistemological issue)?
- forapurpose 8y ago> a long list of opinions of the importance of credentials Those haven't been addressed. I think calling them "opinions" is a big stretch; it's a reliable statement of fact that humanity very often relies on the credentials of the speaker, including their training and experience, for evaluating information they communicate. > What I don't see is any opinion on why the particular arguments are not enough. It's up to the person making the claims to establish them. We can't spend our time refuting everything anyone says. In fact, making claims in order to force others to refute them is a well-known propaganda technique for creating dysfunction, in part because refuting takes far more time than just making claims. (This article is not propaganda, in case anyone thinks I'm implying that.) The arguments made by the author are expert judgments; there's little to address by other means. > it seems that you suggest that we should only discuss articles written by people with credentials on a topic Personally, I want to spend my time on the best knowledge I can find. Life is short. Identifying quality information depends frequently on credentials; I think that's uncontroversial. You keep taking things to an extreme - "only" - and to be clear, those are your words and not mine. Somewhere else I also made that explicit. EDIT: Here it is, copied from another subthread to keep everything in one place: Of course, let's not make this binary, one or the other [merits or credentials]. Everyone uses both to varying degrees, and other signals too (if the post used bad English, for example, many would doubt the author's credibility). In this case, I lean more heavily on expertise because the content is a product of expertise - rules of thumb. If they wrote 'I can create cold fusion in a teacup', I'd lean heavily on the merits - can they do it or not?