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I am so sick of this 'stay in your lane' attitude. Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality. Yo

I am so sick of this 'stay in your lane' attitude. Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality. You can almost set your watch to how often an outsider will analyse a situation from first principles and make money off the 'experts', especially in the stock market. You're welcome to your opinion but this appeal to authority is seriously wearing thin. Pretty much the only field which hasn't been embarrassed by an outsider of late is physics, and even that might not last forever (I remember the smugness with which Stephen Wolfram is routinely dismissed from having non-consensus views of physics). Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders. This whole website is supposed to be a testament to that!

xapata 6y ago
I think bullets 3 and 5 were the main point of that comment. It wasn't well-said, but it is in fact valuable to spend a moment to get familiar with the jargon a person is using, even if that jargon happens to have homonyms with a different field's jargon. That effort is what allows us to "swim out of our lanes" as you might say.
- tompccs 6y ago
  Fair enough, it's more the condescending attitude that rubs me up the wrong way. And if the words regulators use mean to them different things than they mean to everyone else (the people whom the regulations are ostensibly supposed to protect), that's probably interesting in itself! If you are charged with 'theft' under a law that defines 'theft' in a very different way to how you or your peers would define it, that's probably going to be a problem. So I'm all for a discussion on what the jargon actually means, if anyone has any insights beyond making general snipes at the HN community.
  - oasisbob 6y ago
    Theft is a pretty good example, actually. In many US states, the legal definition of "assault" is much different than the battery most people picture. Robbery is not larceny. Burglary is not larceny. Your peers probably don't know what robbery actually is.
    - aaroninsf 6y ago
      This is spot on accurate, Yet my next thought was in the "forest vs trees" direction which as far as I can tell as someone with homemade popcorn watching both this thread, and the "meme stock" story (saw that phrase last night), I will suggest that as in the case of the peers' ignorance of specific legal definitions, it's the thought or thrust that is usually being grappled with, and the dimension of argument is usually not e.g. about the specific crimes some person might be guilty of or not, but rather the fact of their wrongdoing. Where "wrong" is not a legal concept full stop. So too in the case of the GME thing, if not this thread; I suspect that there is a lot of implicit meta-argumentation going on, and that some of what I see in this thread appears to be missing (or more likely, dis-missing) that, to engage in "tree" level quibbling. (All said, I do agree words and their meaning matter; and that when we want to use them informally, because specificity in some domain is not germane to our argument, we would do well to be explicit about that...)
Voloskaya 6y ago
> Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality No, it's just that it's not interesting when an expert is right about their domain expertise so we don't talk about it. The issue is people getting skewed by this and then inferring that it must mean, on average, that their outsider opinion is as valid as experts, but really, it's not.
- tompccs 6y ago
  Of course, an outsider can't simply declare something to be true by dint of being an outsider. You need to reason it. Or, in the market, bet on it, and you'll see who wins out. But experts should be held to the same standard.
  - kd0amg 6y ago
    > Or, in the market, bet on it, and you'll see who wins out. This is a fine way to settle debates about the health/viability of a publicly traded company, but it doesn't help much when the point of contention is a question of law.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      The other issue is that it tends to be underspecified whether a discussion is about law or policy. Someone comes in and describes from first principles what a reasonable system would look like, and then someone else haughtily chastises them because that isn't how the existing system works. But if you read it as they intended it, i.e. as a policy proposal rather than a legal opinion, then the fact that it isn't the existing system is the point. The intention is to change the system to make it that way and the desired response is either support or a criticism of the mechanics of the proposal rather than its basis in existing law.
      - mcguire 6y ago
        On the other hand, many people who reason from first principles fall into two fallacies: First, they believe that their system is how the world should work, and therefore how it would work if only someone, somewhere, weren't interfering. The result is conspiracy theories. Second, they have not fully thought out the consequences, or don't care about them, and dismiss the historical consequences of similar systems in the past. Reasoning with people who ignore evidence in favor of their theorizing is difficult.
wolf550e 6y ago
The non-consensus outsiders who make progress have done the reading. They know what the consensus is, they know all the concepts and the jargon, and they disagree about something. Your post can be interpreted to mean "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge". That's anti-vax thinking and argument. That is not a way to make progress.
- maedla 6y ago
  Yep exactly. For every one outsider that gets it right, how many are wrong? I'd wager, quite a bit
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Expertise is not a Boolean. I'd trust a qualified physicist to make useful predictions about quantum devices, an EE to model an analog circuit, and a structural engineer to design a bridge that doesn't fall down. But financiers, bankers, and economists have a much less convincing record - and that's after you filter out the ones who have been caught breaking the law.
    - 7d6dyeyee 6y ago
      I always hear these sorts of criticisms of economists and financiers but I just don't think they hold water overall. Usually when I hear econ get flak the conversation rapidly devolves into criticisns of the abstract fairness of a solution rather then its priorities and effectiveness within the context. You see this constantly in the US when politicians from either side talk about the bank bailouts, the national debt, minimum wage, immigration, etc. Suddenly, rather than having anything resembling a sober and informed discussion about the topic and the current expert consensus, everyone just starts soapboxing about fatcats and entitlement while larping as intellectuals as they promote fringe 'theories' that happened to coincide with their political objectives. Meanwhile the actual economists and their suggestions get either drowned out or misrepresented.
- cogman10 6y ago
  Pretty well captured by that old comedy sketch "The expert" [1] I dare say that most people here on HN have been hit by upper management telling them to do something stupid or impossible. I'd even wager that most have had them get defensive when you try to explain why doing X isn't a good idea. That's effectively what I see when someone criticizes "experts" broadly and generally. I've long accepted that there are many individuals that know a lot more about subjects I know little about. While I have a pretty good read on things related to computers, I'm more than willing to admit that I'm not an expert in science, medicine, climatology. So who should I trust? Should I trust the youtuber that's "Found" the secret that the "so called experts" are trying to hide from the public? Or should I look to the actual experts actually working in the field and take their word for it? Or do I take the harder route and try and build understanding on the subject on my own? I certainly have tried to expand my personal understanding in general. However, what I've found is that by and large the experts actually know what they are talking about. You should generally trust them. The place where I've found a LOT of misinformation is the "skeptics" that hurl doubt without evidence while denigrating "experts". That is the place where I've found outright lies. Evidence of such BS artists include Flat earthers, Anti-vaxxers, and climate change deniers. Those are all flat out wrong positions. There's mountains of evidence and experts against each of those positions and mostly lies or misrepresentation in favor. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
metalliqaz 6y ago
> Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality. You can almost set your watch to how often an outsider will analyse a situation from first principles and make money off the 'experts', especially in the stock market. When? Who? Are you talking about, say, Dr. Burry and the mortgage bubble? Because he was definitely an 'expert' already.
- slumdev 6y ago
  Dr. Burry was trained as a medical doctor and started investing on the side. Definitely not one of the anointed "experts" who followed the too-common family connections, Ivy League, and i-banking VP path.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    His undergrad degree was in economics from UCLA. He never practiced medicine and started his own hedge fund soon after medical school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry
MattGaiser 6y ago
Non-consensus outsiders who later succeed are usually still experts in the field, not people who are completely unaware that parts of a field exist or people who joined up in the past few hours.
xster 6y ago
This seems like a strawman. The OP isn't arguing against outsider/non-expert discussion. He's just satirizing HN's specific tendencies to spin off of a headline/article first glance into a let-me-teach-you-something fan fiction vs fan fiction argument.
- throwawaylolx 6y ago
  > The OP isn't arguing against outsider/non-expert discussion. Yeah, he's just strawmanning and shaming a hypothetical group for the applauses of a circlejerk.
  - dang 6y ago
    Please don't respond to bad comments by making the thread even worse. That's taking this place in exactly the wrong direction. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- fatsdomino001 6y ago
  That's a tendency for all headlines/articles, not just those on HN
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  A agree that is what OP is doing. Disagree that we can dismiss all HN comments unless they are experts in said field.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
ramraj07 6y ago
Oh boy let's not get started on physicists this week!
iso1631 6y ago
From what I can tell almost no professional investers beat the market, almost nobody wins the lottery. Why should I listen to lottery players or professional wall street gamers?
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Almost no doctors beat terminal cancer. Im going to try this crystal healing method...
  - duckfang 6y ago
    I'll take it you've never gotten a bad diagnosis from a doctor. Those too are disastrous, gets put in your medical record, and local doctors will agree for the sole sake of not refuting another local doctor. But jumping to crystals? Seriously?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    Which, if accompanied by an empathic and engaged healer who manages to fully invoke the power of whatever is that drives the placebo effect, just might stand a chance of being more effective (in certain cases).
- A12-B 6y ago
  Reddit stock traders, some of whom are professional, have consistently beaten the market by using collective action.
  - valuearb 6y ago
    Nope.
- watwut 6y ago
  Because while what you wrote is true, it is not really relevant to how Wall Street earns money. They are not earning money from beating the market.
- iamacyborg 6y ago
nabla9 6y ago
This is not outsider vs. establishment expert. This is effort to learn vs. making hasty judgements issue. I have studied several subjects over 100 - 1000 hours as an outsider, but that does not mean that I can criticize experts. I can ask pointed questions maybe. Being intellectually humble is good. In this issue outsiders should at least read everything Matt Levine writes on the subject as a starting point.
elefanten 6y ago
That’s not at all the attitude I read in gp. Being cognizant of our (humans’) fantastic, ego-bolstering tendencies is a good thing.
uh_uh 6y ago
One could argue that the whole situation came about because outsiders (Reddit users) caught the "experts" (hedge funds) with their pants down.
- mobjack 6y ago
  Market experts have been caught with their pants down many times before because of the actions of uninformed investors. In 1999, the rational move would be to short tech stocks as they were over valued, but those who tried it lost lots of money because they didn't factor in how crazy investors were at driving up the price. You can technically be right but still end up losing everything.
  - VectorLock 6y ago
    This harkens back to the extremely worn threadbare quote "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
- Aunche 6y ago
  Redditors made millions of dollars. A couple hedge funds lost billions. Where did the rest of the money go to? Other institutional investors. Nearly 10% of Gamestop is held by a mutual fund where experts try to pick undervalued stocks. https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?symb=GME&subView=institutional https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...
spamizbad 6y ago
OP isn't asking us to defer to experts - he's arguing there are laypersons not doing enough research before forming an entire theory of how an industry works.
jorblumesea 6y ago
But there's really an entire class of people who have no clue what they're talking about weighing in on things that they clearly do not understand. It's one thing to study this in your own time and make meaningful contributions. It's another to assume that simply because you have an opinion, it's somehow valid.
- dgb23 6y ago
  I think it is useful, as it can imply that the experts have some explaining to do. In this particular instance something seems to be fundamentally broken.
NoOneNew 6y ago
Hey, it's not market manipulation when you're an academic or part of the oligarchy of experts with invested positions. These people are to be cherished and flaunted on news media to state their "unbiased" opinion of market movements. It's manipulation when you're an average joe telling other average joes to stick it to a firm that's trying to bankrupt another company that's struggling through the pandemic.
JamesBarney 6y ago
The non experts who do this are almost always people who have spent significant amounts of time familiarizing themselves with the literature. It is fairly obvious that this is not the case for most people in threads about GME.
thesteamboat 6y ago
> Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality. You can almost set your watch to how often an outsider will analyse a situation from first principles and make money off the 'experts', especially in the stock market. > Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders. This whole website is supposed to be a testament to that! Even granting that these statements are accurate (which plenty of sibling comments are willing to dispute) I don't think these statements suggest that "Stay in your lane" is bad advice. Why? It's a question of distributions. For any given task/field there are a lot more laypeople than experts. Consider the following simple model where we quantify some arbitrary ability score. If lay people's scores are normally distributed with a low mean and expert's scores are normally distributed with a high mean we can still see the best lay person beating all the experts simply because there are so many more of them. "You don't know more than the 'experts'" is good advice for almost everyone even if there are counterexamples. There's a separate problem I think you're trying to point at where in some fields credentials don't correlate as well with expertise as one would hope. But even if credentials are an imperfect proxy for expertise, they are probably better than just trusting your gut in the absence of any expertise of your own. > Pretty much the only field which hasn't been embarrassed by an outsider of late is physics, [...] This seems an idiosyncratic take on the current state of science to me. I've seen plenty of examples of a field being embarrassed by insiders (e.g. the replication crisis of psychology) or seen great results from experts who were not particularly recognized by the system as set up (see Yitang Zhang's work on the twin prime conjecture). What I don't think I've seen is a field's dogma being overthrown by a complete outsider. For the sake of my own calibration, I'd welcome any examples of this.
kmeisthax 6y ago
The existence of outsiders disproving consensus opinion with a more-correct contrarian one does not mean every outsider with a contrarian opinion is right.
hazeii 6y ago
Planck's Principle: "Science advances one funeral at a time" [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
Chris2048 6y ago
> I remember the smugness with which Stephen Wolfram is routinely dismissed from having non-consensus views of physics The guy is disliked for taking too much credit for things, not for "having non-consensus views" - which is sort of the opposite problem.
- btilly 6y ago
  He is disliked for different things by different people. See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-criticize-stephen-wolframs-theory-of-everything/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-critic... for scientists dismissing his theories of physics.
  - Chris2048 6y ago
    Maybe, but I was talking about ppl on HN
    - btilly 6y ago
      People on HN are merely a (rather biased) sample of people in the world. Just as people in general can dislike him for different reasons, people on HN do as well. I respect him for his work in programming. I dislike him for assuming that success makes him correct in whatever theories he comes up with in physics. Particularly when he has failed to produce any testable predictions.
feralimal 6y ago
Great response! I agree.
na85 6y ago
>I am so sick of this 'stay in your lane' attitude. And I am so sick of the HN-trademark "I'm smarter than the average bear" arrogance that you display here. Pick an article about nuanced subjects like COVID vaccines, the 737 Max, the law in general. Guaranteed the comments section here has dozens of people incorrecting each other about semantics of these subjects in which they are not domain experts. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but your opinion is worth less than that of a domain expert.
whateveracct 6y ago
i think it's an appeal to not spouting answers when you should be asking questions
chosen1111 6y ago
Does medical advice fall into this consensus trap? If so...relative to today?
- astrange 6y ago
  It is a good example of it, eg anything American doctors would’ve told you about wearing face masks was wrong until it wasn’t (and the CDC director is still telling people not to wear N95s), they still give terrible diet advice like telling diabetics to eat more carbs, and so on. Doctors are quite bad at making reasonable decisions when they don’t have an RCT in front of them.
  - Dirlewanger 6y ago
    Yup. Your average PCP/internist is good at one thing: analyzing your symptoms and directing you toward someone who actually can help you. Not saying that a yearly check-up isn't beneficial (it is), just that they shouldn't be prescribing Type 2 diabetes medications on the spot (and getting kickbacks) and instead should tell the patient to stop stuffing their faces so much.
    - astrange 6y ago
      Well, the advice specifically is more like "dear Type 2 diabetics, don't forget that if you eat less than 200g of carbs every day, you'll die of heart attacks from that evil saturated fat".
  - prepend 6y ago
    > CDC director is still telling people not to wear N95s This is an interesting point. The statement I read from her is saying that N95s are hard to wear for long periods of time, so people will wear them improperly. So the overall adherence is higher with cloth coverings and have a net higher benefit. She’s not saying “don’t wear n95s” she’s saying “we don’t recommend it because...” This is an important distinction. Also N95s have to be fit tested to be effective. So randos buying N95s and wearing them will frequently not work.
colechristensen 6y ago
It's not about staying in your lane, it's about being more aware of your ignorance. What you notice, over and over, is the people talking the loudest about most things have very little real idea about whatever they're talking about. The truth is almost always more boring than the most attention-grabbing theory, this bias found all over for the non-expert with the big opinion needs to stop. People with the stock industry conspiracy theories are doing the exact same thing as voter fraud people. That is, people with almost no information are forming theories about a secret cabal of the powerful keeping them down. The reality which is becoming obvious is that trades were at several brokerages were halted because of capital requirements for brokerage firms. The capital requirements for some of these meme stocks changed, the stocks were very broadly held at these brokerages, and they simply didn't have the capital on hand where it needed to be to cover the requirements. That's (1) a lot more boring, and (2) a lot more complicated than a conspiracy about market fixing, so it doesn't get attention outside of people who actually know.
esoterica 6y ago
Haha, of course you're The Type of Guy who worships Wolfram. You know he's a total crank right.
- dang 6y ago
  Personal attacks are not cool here regardless of how wrong another comment is or how much you disagree with someone. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
kortilla 6y ago
The comment above you is lamenting not even looking up what the stuff means before commenting. That has nothing to do with insider vs outsider.
rodgerd 6y ago
> I am so sick of this 'stay in your lane' attitude. Is that you, Michael Gove. > You're welcome to your opinion but this appeal to authority is seriously wearing thin. It is you, Michael Gove. > Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders. Certainly the spread of COVID19 in the UK and US is evidence that something can spread with the encouragement of "non-consensus outsiders".
- dang 6y ago
  Please do not post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how wrong a comment is or you feel it is. We're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
There's an important difference between "stay in your lane" and "keep your mouth shut until you know what you're talking about".
- tux1968 6y ago
  Sometimes opening your mouth and saying the wrong thing is the quickest way to improve your understanding. Starting with an incorrect premise and then talking/arguing things out until your understanding comes more in line with reality is a pretty healthy tact. Essentially Agile development, just applied more broadly.
mumblemumble 6y ago
Point #3 doesn't seem consistent with the idea that this is just a "stay in your lane" attitude. "Lurk before you leap" might be a better phrase. You've got to do at least a little homework before you can understand a technical topic well enough to make sense of what you're reading. I am less familiar with finance, but I see this all the time when HN discusses legal matters. The conversation is almost pure noise, because it's dominated by people who have so little knowledge of the topic in question that they don't even recognize a term of art when they're seeing one. Which, in turn, engenders fundamental misunderstandings, and so the whole conversation ends up being a sort of large-scale trainer battle at the gym that specializes in strawman-type Pokémon. Imagine if a discussion of programming were dominated by non-programmers who are seemingly willfully ignorant that, in the context, the word "functional" does not mean "designed to be practical and useful, rather than attractive."
- novok 6y ago
  Or to quote another software saying, RTFM
  - abakker 6y ago
    Truly a motto to live by.
deleted 6y ago
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a-dub 6y ago
i think overall people are feeling a little burned by trump's anti-filter and rampant conspiracy theories that have taken hold recently and as such are retreating to respect for status and authority. there is some good to come of it, but i do wonder if the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater. true experts can handily defeat nonsensical arguments in their fields and unusual viewpoints can enrich their thinking.
jancsika 6y ago
> I am so sick of this 'stay in your lane' attitude. To my mind, I'm doing the equivalent of chiding front-end beginners for not spending a few minutes reading the part of the ecmascript spec that describes the language's primitive values. (Or at least a primer that covers the names of those types.) That spec is free, and I can probably find the relevant section faster than I can type this sentence. Actually, it took me a minute and a half-- it's in section 6.1.6: "ECMAScript Language Types" of the ECMAScript 2020 spec. It doesn't take much longer to skim that section and start a mental model with at least the name for each primitive type. Armed even with that superficial knowledge, a beginner is less likely to make mistakes in communication with others. E.g., they are less likely to read a tutorial on symbols, confuse it with a tutorial on strings, and/or waste the author's time asking a question about strings. Someone who hasn't read the spec (or at least a primer) might assume that those words are synonyms, or perhaps that "symbol" refers to the content, or has something to do with unicode code points, or has the same relationship and single and double quotes in ecmascript. I have no doubt such a beginner can concoct all kinds of interesting definitions for "symbol" from first principles. Perhaps in some cases their own idiosyncratic misunderstanding describes some "alternate ecmascript" language that has superior features to the real ecmascript. That we can so easily construct these alternate realities is cool in and of itself and is an obvious part of the learning process. What isn't cool is when a critical mass of commenters who don't know and won't learn the basic terminology pretend to have a discussion about a topic which in reality each comment is in it's on parallel universe of idiosyncratic terminology. Especially on this topic, it's extremely likely that one's idiosyncratic, uneducated take is going to be immensely more boring and fruitless when compared to accurate and well-informed takes on what played out in the stock market over the past week. I look forward to posting something like this the next time the topics of macroeconomics or unions come up.
skeeter2020 6y ago
>> Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders. Don't confuse cause and effect. This doesn't mean all anti-consensus ideas are genius and progress. Most are still just junk. See the "all big thinks initially looked like toys" meme for another example.
jrochkind1 6y ago
When it comes to how the authorities will act, is one of the few places that appeals to authority are absolutely reasonable. What do the regulations and laws actually mean and how are they actually in real life enforced historically? Oh yeah appeal to authority. We're literally talking about the authorities. Laws and regulations -- and business arrangements and customs -- aren't some kind of objective external thing to be observed scientifically from first principles. That's the whole error. Like if you can show a logical flaw you can prove they are't really so because they must be logical! They are socially constructed and the result of human action, by people with the power to do so, for particular ends. They are continually re-constructed by human action, they are constructed by the powerful.

xapata 6y ago

I think bullets 3 and 5 were the main point of that comment. It wasn't well-said, but it is in fact valuable to spend a moment to get familiar with the jargon a person is using, even if that jargon happens to have homonyms with a different field's jargon. That effort is what allows us to "swim out of our lanes" as you might say.

tompccs 6y ago
Fair enough, it's more the condescending attitude that rubs me up the wrong way. And if the words regulators use mean to them different things than they mean to everyone else (the people whom the regulations are ostensibly supposed to protect), that's probably interesting in itself! If you are charged with 'theft' under a law that defines 'theft' in a very different way to how you or your peers would define it, that's probably going to be a problem. So I'm all for a discussion on what the jargon actually means, if anyone has any insights beyond making general snipes at the HN community.
- oasisbob 6y ago
  Theft is a pretty good example, actually. In many US states, the legal definition of "assault" is much different than the battery most people picture. Robbery is not larceny. Burglary is not larceny. Your peers probably don't know what robbery actually is.
  - aaroninsf 6y ago
    This is spot on accurate, Yet my next thought was in the "forest vs trees" direction which as far as I can tell as someone with homemade popcorn watching both this thread, and the "meme stock" story (saw that phrase last night), I will suggest that as in the case of the peers' ignorance of specific legal definitions, it's the thought or thrust that is usually being grappled with, and the dimension of argument is usually not e.g. about the specific crimes some person might be guilty of or not, but rather the fact of their wrongdoing. Where "wrong" is not a legal concept full stop. So too in the case of the GME thing, if not this thread; I suspect that there is a lot of implicit meta-argumentation going on, and that some of what I see in this thread appears to be missing (or more likely, dis-missing) that, to engage in "tree" level quibbling. (All said, I do agree words and their meaning matter; and that when we want to use them informally, because specificity in some domain is not germane to our argument, we would do well to be explicit about that...)

Voloskaya 6y ago

> Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality No, it's just that it's not interesting when an expert is right about their domain expertise so we don't talk about it. The issue is people getting skewed by this and then inferring that it must mean, on average, that their outsider opinion is as valid as experts, but really, it's not.

tompccs 6y ago
Of course, an outsider can't simply declare something to be true by dint of being an outsider. You need to reason it. Or, in the market, bet on it, and you'll see who wins out. But experts should be held to the same standard.
- kd0amg 6y ago
  > Or, in the market, bet on it, and you'll see who wins out. This is a fine way to settle debates about the health/viability of a publicly traded company, but it doesn't help much when the point of contention is a question of law.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    The other issue is that it tends to be underspecified whether a discussion is about law or policy. Someone comes in and describes from first principles what a reasonable system would look like, and then someone else haughtily chastises them because that isn't how the existing system works. But if you read it as they intended it, i.e. as a policy proposal rather than a legal opinion, then the fact that it isn't the existing system is the point. The intention is to change the system to make it that way and the desired response is either support or a criticism of the mechanics of the proposal rather than its basis in existing law.
    - mcguire 6y ago
      On the other hand, many people who reason from first principles fall into two fallacies: First, they believe that their system is how the world should work, and therefore how it would work if only someone, somewhere, weren't interfering. The result is conspiracy theories. Second, they have not fully thought out the consequences, or don't care about them, and dismiss the historical consequences of similar systems in the past. Reasoning with people who ignore evidence in favor of their theorizing is difficult.

wolf550e 6y ago

The non-consensus outsiders who make progress have done the reading. They know what the consensus is, they know all the concepts and the jargon, and they disagree about something. Your post can be interpreted to mean "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge". That's anti-vax thinking and argument. That is not a way to make progress.

maedla 6y ago
Yep exactly. For every one outsider that gets it right, how many are wrong? I'd wager, quite a bit
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Expertise is not a Boolean. I'd trust a qualified physicist to make useful predictions about quantum devices, an EE to model an analog circuit, and a structural engineer to design a bridge that doesn't fall down. But financiers, bankers, and economists have a much less convincing record - and that's after you filter out the ones who have been caught breaking the law.
  - 7d6dyeyee 6y ago
    I always hear these sorts of criticisms of economists and financiers but I just don't think they hold water overall. Usually when I hear econ get flak the conversation rapidly devolves into criticisns of the abstract fairness of a solution rather then its priorities and effectiveness within the context. You see this constantly in the US when politicians from either side talk about the bank bailouts, the national debt, minimum wage, immigration, etc. Suddenly, rather than having anything resembling a sober and informed discussion about the topic and the current expert consensus, everyone just starts soapboxing about fatcats and entitlement while larping as intellectuals as they promote fringe 'theories' that happened to coincide with their political objectives. Meanwhile the actual economists and their suggestions get either drowned out or misrepresented.
cogman10 6y ago
Pretty well captured by that old comedy sketch "The expert" [1] I dare say that most people here on HN have been hit by upper management telling them to do something stupid or impossible. I'd even wager that most have had them get defensive when you try to explain why doing X isn't a good idea. That's effectively what I see when someone criticizes "experts" broadly and generally. I've long accepted that there are many individuals that know a lot more about subjects I know little about. While I have a pretty good read on things related to computers, I'm more than willing to admit that I'm not an expert in science, medicine, climatology. So who should I trust? Should I trust the youtuber that's "Found" the secret that the "so called experts" are trying to hide from the public? Or should I look to the actual experts actually working in the field and take their word for it? Or do I take the harder route and try and build understanding on the subject on my own? I certainly have tried to expand my personal understanding in general. However, what I've found is that by and large the experts actually know what they are talking about. You should generally trust them. The place where I've found a LOT of misinformation is the "skeptics" that hurl doubt without evidence while denigrating "experts". That is the place where I've found outright lies. Evidence of such BS artists include Flat earthers, Anti-vaxxers, and climate change deniers. Those are all flat out wrong positions. There's mountains of evidence and experts against each of those positions and mostly lies or misrepresentation in favor. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

metalliqaz 6y ago

slumdev 6y ago
Dr. Burry was trained as a medical doctor and started investing on the side. Definitely not one of the anointed "experts" who followed the too-common family connections, Ivy League, and i-banking VP path.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  His undergrad degree was in economics from UCLA. He never practiced medicine and started his own hedge fund soon after medical school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry

MattGaiser 6y ago

Non-consensus outsiders who later succeed are usually still experts in the field, not people who are completely unaware that parts of a field exist or people who joined up in the past few hours.

xster 6y ago

This seems like a strawman. The OP isn't arguing against outsider/non-expert discussion. He's just satirizing HN's specific tendencies to spin off of a headline/article first glance into a let-me-teach-you-something fan fiction vs fan fiction argument.

throwawaylolx 6y ago
> The OP isn't arguing against outsider/non-expert discussion. Yeah, he's just strawmanning and shaming a hypothetical group for the applauses of a circlejerk.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't respond to bad comments by making the thread even worse. That's taking this place in exactly the wrong direction. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
fatsdomino001 6y ago
That's a tendency for all headlines/articles, not just those on HN
JKCalhoun 6y ago
A agree that is what OP is doing. Disagree that we can dismiss all HN comments unless they are experts in said field.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

ramraj07 6y ago

Oh boy let's not get started on physicists this week!

iso1631 6y ago

From what I can tell almost no professional investers beat the market, almost nobody wins the lottery. Why should I listen to lottery players or professional wall street gamers?

koheripbal 6y ago
Almost no doctors beat terminal cancer. Im going to try this crystal healing method...
- duckfang 6y ago
  I'll take it you've never gotten a bad diagnosis from a doctor. Those too are disastrous, gets put in your medical record, and local doctors will agree for the sole sake of not refuting another local doctor. But jumping to crystals? Seriously?
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  Which, if accompanied by an empathic and engaged healer who manages to fully invoke the power of whatever is that drives the placebo effect, just might stand a chance of being more effective (in certain cases).
A12-B 6y ago
Reddit stock traders, some of whom are professional, have consistently beaten the market by using collective action.
- valuearb 6y ago
  Nope.
watwut 6y ago
Because while what you wrote is true, it is not really relevant to how Wall Street earns money. They are not earning money from beating the market.
iamacyborg 6y ago

nabla9 6y ago

This is not outsider vs. establishment expert. This is effort to learn vs. making hasty judgements issue. I have studied several subjects over 100 - 1000 hours as an outsider, but that does not mean that I can criticize experts. I can ask pointed questions maybe. Being intellectually humble is good. In this issue outsiders should at least read everything Matt Levine writes on the subject as a starting point.

elefanten 6y ago

That’s not at all the attitude I read in gp. Being cognizant of our (humans’) fantastic, ego-bolstering tendencies is a good thing.

uh_uh 6y ago

One could argue that the whole situation came about because outsiders (Reddit users) caught the "experts" (hedge funds) with their pants down.

mobjack 6y ago
Market experts have been caught with their pants down many times before because of the actions of uninformed investors. In 1999, the rational move would be to short tech stocks as they were over valued, but those who tried it lost lots of money because they didn't factor in how crazy investors were at driving up the price. You can technically be right but still end up losing everything.
- VectorLock 6y ago
  This harkens back to the extremely worn threadbare quote "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
Aunche 6y ago
Redditors made millions of dollars. A couple hedge funds lost billions. Where did the rest of the money go to? Other institutional investors. Nearly 10% of Gamestop is held by a mutual fund where experts try to pick undervalued stocks. https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?symb=GME&subView=institutional https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...

spamizbad 6y ago

OP isn't asking us to defer to experts - he's arguing there are laypersons not doing enough research before forming an entire theory of how an industry works.

jorblumesea 6y ago

But there's really an entire class of people who have no clue what they're talking about weighing in on things that they clearly do not understand. It's one thing to study this in your own time and make meaningful contributions. It's another to assume that simply because you have an opinion, it's somehow valid.

dgb23 6y ago
I think it is useful, as it can imply that the experts have some explaining to do. In this particular instance something seems to be fundamentally broken.

NoOneNew 6y ago

Hey, it's not market manipulation when you're an academic or part of the oligarchy of experts with invested positions. These people are to be cherished and flaunted on news media to state their "unbiased" opinion of market movements. It's manipulation when you're an average joe telling other average joes to stick it to a firm that's trying to bankrupt another company that's struggling through the pandemic.

JamesBarney 6y ago

The non experts who do this are almost always people who have spent significant amounts of time familiarizing themselves with the literature. It is fairly obvious that this is not the case for most people in threads about GME.

thesteamboat 6y ago

> Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality. You can almost set your watch to how often an outsider will analyse a situation from first principles and make money off the 'experts', especially in the stock market. > Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders. This whole website is supposed to be a testament to that! Even granting that these statements are accurate (which plenty of sibling comments are willing to dispute) I don't think these statements suggest that "Stay in your lane" is bad advice. Why? It's a question of distributions. For any given task/field there are a lot more laypeople than experts. Consider the following simple model where we quantify some arbitrary ability score. If lay people's scores are normally distributed with a low mean and expert's scores are normally distributed with a high mean we can still see the best lay person beating all the experts simply because there are so many more of them. "You don't know more than the 'experts'" is good advice for almost everyone even if there are counterexamples. There's a separate problem I think you're trying to point at where in some fields credentials don't correlate as well with expertise as one would hope. But even if credentials are an imperfect proxy for expertise, they are probably better than just trusting your gut in the absence of any expertise of your own. > Pretty much the only field which hasn't been embarrassed by an outsider of late is physics, [...] This seems an idiosyncratic take on the current state of science to me. I've seen plenty of examples of a field being embarrassed by insiders (e.g. the replication crisis of psychology) or seen great results from experts who were not particularly recognized by the system as set up (see Yitang Zhang's work on the twin prime conjecture). What I don't think I've seen is a field's dogma being overthrown by a complete outsider. For the sake of my own calibration, I'd welcome any examples of this.

kmeisthax 6y ago

The existence of outsiders disproving consensus opinion with a more-correct contrarian one does not mean every outsider with a contrarian opinion is right.

hazeii 6y ago

Planck's Principle: "Science advances one funeral at a time" [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

Chris2048 6y ago

> I remember the smugness with which Stephen Wolfram is routinely dismissed from having non-consensus views of physics The guy is disliked for taking too much credit for things, not for "having non-consensus views" - which is sort of the opposite problem.

btilly 6y ago
He is disliked for different things by different people. See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-criticize-stephen-wolframs-theory-of-everything/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-critic... for scientists dismissing his theories of physics.
- Chris2048 6y ago
  Maybe, but I was talking about ppl on HN
  - btilly 6y ago
    People on HN are merely a (rather biased) sample of people in the world. Just as people in general can dislike him for different reasons, people on HN do as well. I respect him for his work in programming. I dislike him for assuming that success makes him correct in whatever theories he comes up with in physics. Particularly when he has failed to produce any testable predictions.

feralimal 6y ago

Great response! I agree.

na85 6y ago

>I am so sick of this 'stay in your lane' attitude. And I am so sick of the HN-trademark "I'm smarter than the average bear" arrogance that you display here. Pick an article about nuanced subjects like COVID vaccines, the 737 Max, the law in general. Guaranteed the comments section here has dozens of people incorrecting each other about semantics of these subjects in which they are not domain experts. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but your opinion is worth less than that of a domain expert.

whateveracct 6y ago

i think it's an appeal to not spouting answers when you should be asking questions

chosen1111 6y ago

Does medical advice fall into this consensus trap? If so...relative to today?

astrange 6y ago
It is a good example of it, eg anything American doctors would’ve told you about wearing face masks was wrong until it wasn’t (and the CDC director is still telling people not to wear N95s), they still give terrible diet advice like telling diabetics to eat more carbs, and so on. Doctors are quite bad at making reasonable decisions when they don’t have an RCT in front of them.
- Dirlewanger 6y ago
  Yup. Your average PCP/internist is good at one thing: analyzing your symptoms and directing you toward someone who actually can help you. Not saying that a yearly check-up isn't beneficial (it is), just that they shouldn't be prescribing Type 2 diabetes medications on the spot (and getting kickbacks) and instead should tell the patient to stop stuffing their faces so much.
  - astrange 6y ago
    Well, the advice specifically is more like "dear Type 2 diabetics, don't forget that if you eat less than 200g of carbs every day, you'll die of heart attacks from that evil saturated fat".
- prepend 6y ago
  > CDC director is still telling people not to wear N95s This is an interesting point. The statement I read from her is saying that N95s are hard to wear for long periods of time, so people will wear them improperly. So the overall adherence is higher with cloth coverings and have a net higher benefit. She’s not saying “don’t wear n95s” she’s saying “we don’t recommend it because...” This is an important distinction. Also N95s have to be fit tested to be effective. So randos buying N95s and wearing them will frequently not work.

colechristensen 6y ago

It's not about staying in your lane, it's about being more aware of your ignorance. What you notice, over and over, is the people talking the loudest about most things have very little real idea about whatever they're talking about. The truth is almost always more boring than the most attention-grabbing theory, this bias found all over for the non-expert with the big opinion needs to stop. People with the stock industry conspiracy theories are doing the exact same thing as voter fraud people. That is, people with almost no information are forming theories about a secret cabal of the powerful keeping them down. The reality which is becoming obvious is that trades were at several brokerages were halted because of capital requirements for brokerage firms. The capital requirements for some of these meme stocks changed, the stocks were very broadly held at these brokerages, and they simply didn't have the capital on hand where it needed to be to cover the requirements. That's (1) a lot more boring, and (2) a lot more complicated than a conspiracy about market fixing, so it doesn't get attention outside of people who actually know.

esoterica 6y ago

Haha, of course you're The Type of Guy who worships Wolfram. You know he's a total crank right.

dang 6y ago
Personal attacks are not cool here regardless of how wrong another comment is or how much you disagree with someone. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

kortilla 6y ago

The comment above you is lamenting not even looking up what the stuff means before commenting. That has nothing to do with insider vs outsider.

rodgerd 6y ago

> I am so sick of this 'stay in your lane' attitude. Is that you, Michael Gove. > You're welcome to your opinion but this appeal to authority is seriously wearing thin. It is you, Michael Gove. > Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders. Certainly the spread of COVID19 in the UK and US is evidence that something can spread with the encouragement of "non-consensus outsiders".

dang 6y ago
Please do not post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how wrong a comment is or you feel it is. We're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

There's an important difference between "stay in your lane" and "keep your mouth shut until you know what you're talking about".

tux1968 6y ago
Sometimes opening your mouth and saying the wrong thing is the quickest way to improve your understanding. Starting with an incorrect premise and then talking/arguing things out until your understanding comes more in line with reality is a pretty healthy tact. Essentially Agile development, just applied more broadly.

mumblemumble 6y ago

Point #3 doesn't seem consistent with the idea that this is just a "stay in your lane" attitude. "Lurk before you leap" might be a better phrase. You've got to do at least a little homework before you can understand a technical topic well enough to make sense of what you're reading. I am less familiar with finance, but I see this all the time when HN discusses legal matters. The conversation is almost pure noise, because it's dominated by people who have so little knowledge of the topic in question that they don't even recognize a term of art when they're seeing one. Which, in turn, engenders fundamental misunderstandings, and so the whole conversation ends up being a sort of large-scale trainer battle at the gym that specializes in strawman-type Pokémon. Imagine if a discussion of programming were dominated by non-programmers who are seemingly willfully ignorant that, in the context, the word "functional" does not mean "designed to be practical and useful, rather than attractive."

novok 6y ago
Or to quote another software saying, RTFM
- abakker 6y ago
  Truly a motto to live by.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

a-dub 6y ago

i think overall people are feeling a little burned by trump's anti-filter and rampant conspiracy theories that have taken hold recently and as such are retreating to respect for status and authority. there is some good to come of it, but i do wonder if the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater. true experts can handily defeat nonsensical arguments in their fields and unusual viewpoints can enrich their thinking.

jancsika 6y ago

> I am so sick of this 'stay in your lane' attitude. To my mind, I'm doing the equivalent of chiding front-end beginners for not spending a few minutes reading the part of the ecmascript spec that describes the language's primitive values. (Or at least a primer that covers the names of those types.) That spec is free, and I can probably find the relevant section faster than I can type this sentence. Actually, it took me a minute and a half-- it's in section 6.1.6: "ECMAScript Language Types" of the ECMAScript 2020 spec. It doesn't take much longer to skim that section and start a mental model with at least the name for each primitive type. Armed even with that superficial knowledge, a beginner is less likely to make mistakes in communication with others. E.g., they are less likely to read a tutorial on symbols, confuse it with a tutorial on strings, and/or waste the author's time asking a question about strings. Someone who hasn't read the spec (or at least a primer) might assume that those words are synonyms, or perhaps that "symbol" refers to the content, or has something to do with unicode code points, or has the same relationship and single and double quotes in ecmascript. I have no doubt such a beginner can concoct all kinds of interesting definitions for "symbol" from first principles. Perhaps in some cases their own idiosyncratic misunderstanding describes some "alternate ecmascript" language that has superior features to the real ecmascript. That we can so easily construct these alternate realities is cool in and of itself and is an obvious part of the learning process. What isn't cool is when a critical mass of commenters who don't know and won't learn the basic terminology pretend to have a discussion about a topic which in reality each comment is in it's on parallel universe of idiosyncratic terminology. Especially on this topic, it's extremely likely that one's idiosyncratic, uneducated take is going to be immensely more boring and fruitless when compared to accurate and well-informed takes on what played out in the stock market over the past week. I look forward to posting something like this the next time the topics of macroeconomics or unions come up.

skeeter2020 6y ago

>> Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders. Don't confuse cause and effect. This doesn't mean all anti-consensus ideas are genius and progress. Most are still just junk. See the "all big thinks initially looked like toys" meme for another example.

jrochkind1 6y ago

When it comes to how the authorities will act, is one of the few places that appeals to authority are absolutely reasonable. What do the regulations and laws actually mean and how are they actually in real life enforced historically? Oh yeah appeal to authority. We're literally talking about the authorities. Laws and regulations -- and business arrangements and customs -- aren't some kind of objective external thing to be observed scientifically from first principles. That's the whole error. Like if you can show a logical flaw you can prove they are't really so because they must be logical! They are socially constructed and the result of human action, by people with the power to do so, for particular ends. They are continually re-constructed by human action, they are constructed by the powerful.