>Seems a little bold to just wade in and claim to have noticed a universal rule of government.. This is, for better or worse, the way the 'rationalist' communi

>Seems a little bold to just wade in and claim to have noticed a universal rule of government.. This is, for better or worse, the way the 'rationalist' community operates. The maximum amount of reading on any topic not directly related to computers or electronics is one or - for the truly enlightened - two pop-polsci or pop-phil books. That's all you can expect. Sometimes it extends more generally than just computing, for instance, Scott Alexander is a psychiatrist. But the spirit is the same - almost unlimited license to opine on any topic with the minimal amount of background knowledge possible in order to properly secure the status of being an ignorant (on the topic) person's smart person. That's not to say it's entirely bad. Sometimes outside perspectives are good in that they challenge us to think in a new way about things. They ask questions with some thought that a domain expert may have trouble answering. They don't work in any particular established framework of the topic, so situating their theoretical commitments because less relevant to the topic at hand (which can also be a good thing). They love to write and make their opinions known. That's also not a bad thing. But it doesn't inspire confidence. If you're knowledgable about a field and you see one of their posts that's either on a theory that's been covered a century ago (and refuted) or a theory that is fundamentally at odds with the discipline, it makes you skeptical. You start to think "if they're wrong about this, then what else are they wrong about?". These bloggers have all heard of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. It's just too bad they don't realize it applies to them just as much, if not more, than to the journalists they typically decry for having no background knowledge on a topic. Every bold and poorly-argued claim you used to see in undergrad theses is now published in blog form - the only difference is these people never had a supervisor to look over their shoulder and question them. I wrote about this phenomenon as practiced by "hacker bloggers" a little more than a year ago in this comment[0], though I think I was being a little too harsh back then, and ironically, also speaking beyond my field of knowledge. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101989