9 ms·

What Everyone Knows

75 points by birriel 4y ago

bckr 4y ago
this is another post that I wish went beyond the idea it is proposing and gave some researched stances on that idea, like who was more right at the beginning of covid and how they are different from people who were less right
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Ouch, I think nobody will like the answer to this. It's just my impression, obviously, because I haven't done any formal research on this, but looks like the actual experts know how much they know and how much they don't know, and were quite fine since the start. Also, every single channel that turns their opinions into advice or policy is noisy by an absurd level. So much that what experts think isn't even relevant to predict their results.
  - bckr 4y ago
    I have no real opinions other than remembering that advice around masking changed a lot. So I'm genuinely curious.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      That first advice about masks, when every expert expected them to work was a bit damning but not all of the problem. Have you noticed that the public still doesn't know that surface cleaning isn't relevant? Or that masks on open spaces were deemed essential until the policy just shifted to agree with the public actions, without the gained expertise being used at all? (They are useful in crowds, and useless outside of one.) Or that ventilation is essential in closed spaces? But it didn't stop on that. There was just no useful communication of how crowd immunity worked, just some shit from the crazy "let's kill people" ones, and how it related to vaccines. The result is that the public was surprised by it going down when it did, and in a larger way by the shape of the omicron spread. And on the subject of vaccines, there was no communication at all about the safety of them... what is unsettling, because they are safe to a nearly absurd level (all the ones used on the West, including the one that got suspended everywhere due to unexpected risks.) Overall, if we had the same pandemic again, the public would be none the wise on how to protect themselves, or what expect from it. No information reaches the people, ever.
- narag 4y ago
  I remember most predictions (by "real" experts, at least the ones I paid attention to) were right except one: it will take two years to create a useful vaccine. It was more like six months. Actually I don't remember who they were, I got the impression that there was a consensus, unlike what happened with politicians.
h2odragon 4y ago
> Is there a way to arrive at a proto-consensus fast Yes, you use your individual judgement and go with that; updating as you can. "consensus" here is an appeal to avoid individual responsibility. Embrace the possibility of being wrong (or right) on your own. In the wider civilization context; a society that unites behind one approach to a problem is more likely to fail big than to succeed big. "A free society pulls all kinds of different directions," as Pterry put it. Often the best solutions are only recognized after some crazy shit is tried, but they are recognized as best in part because the crazy shit was tried.
- nemothekid 4y ago
  >"consensus" here is an appeal to avoid individual responsibility. Embrace the possibility of being wrong (or right) on your own. The problem with hyper-individualism is that some systems only work if everyone is bought in (either willingly or by force). You can't have public schooling without forcing those without kids to pay; and therefore you need people without kids to pay taxes to send kids to school. Likewise you can't build a corporation without achieving some kind of consensus with the people in your organization. That was the problem with COVID. Lockdowns were effectively meaningless if they couldn't be enforced. On a global scale this meant that someone in China who "embraced the possibility of being wrong (or right) on your own" could fly to Italy and wipe out 100,000 people.
  - naniwaduni 4y ago
    > You can't have public schooling without forcing those without kids to pay; and therefore you need people without kids to pay taxes to send kids to school. What, no, you definitely can. We already have infra to tax people differently depending on the number of kids they have. There isn't the political will to rest the entire tax burden of supporting public schooling to people with kids, and obviously that would require raising taxes on those with kids to compensate for loss of tax revenue from people without kids, but there's no actual incompatibility here.
    - nemothekid 4y ago
Barrera 4y ago
> Most of “what everyone knows” is true. Most of our knowledge as modern human beings is shared with many others. Everyone knows the capital of France is Paris, and it is true. Everyone knows how many letters in the alphabet, the color of stop lights, the shape of a rainbow. What everyone knows is usually correct. However, sometimes what everyone knows is wrong. Everyone knew humans could not fly, or build 100 stories into the air, or run a company renting out your extra bedroom. Turns out what everyone knows is sometimes wrong. But it is very hard to tell the difference. The affirmative examples are all conventions. We know them to be true because it's within our power to make it so just by agreeing with each other. The negative examples are not conventions. They are about what will happen in the future. So it's not just "sometimes what everyone knows it wrong." More like, on topics involving observation, deduction, or prediction what everyone "knows" is more likely to be wrong than right. The history of science provides ample evidence. Those claiming that "the science is settled" are trying to manipulate the public.
- karmakaze 4y ago
  Thanks for saying. I couldn't even read the complete article based on the lack of consistency as I don't know what rules of logic apply given the examples. I did skim further and see something about a project at Google and another bad example COVID. The main point that's off isn't that we haven't built good communications for consensus but rather the dominant information flows we've built actively diverge from concensus.
- zaik 4y ago
  > Those claiming that "the science is settled" are trying to manipulate the public. This line of reasoning is also popular among flat earthers, perpetual motion machine builders and climate change deniers.
  - RobertRoberts 4y ago
    Religious tyrants, crusaders and all sorts of dictatorial rulers down through history used this exact same logic. How are current leaders any different using the same reasoning and language?
staz 4y ago
> Everyone knows how many letters in the alphabet I would expect everyone to know that they is more than one alphabet and that they each don't have the same number of letter ...
- throwamon 4y ago
  Yeah, but I bet most (western?) people don't know the slightly less obvious concept that not all writing systems are alphabets.
kissgyorgy 4y ago
Coronavirus research was not "fast science" at all, there have been ongoing research for decades about coronaviruses before the pandemic hit.
- hammock 4y ago
  What did it say?
someweirdperson 4y ago
And then there's things that everyone knows and that are wrong. Like famous movie quotes. "I am your father, Luke". Known as the Mandela effect [1]. A fast-mode consensus has a high probability to create lasting wrong "truths", that will be difficult to dispell later. The proper way would be to attach probabilities to information, but that would be too much for most readers, and impossible to do for most normal jounalists. We're doomed in any case. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_Effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_Effect
- colinsane 4y ago
  > The proper way would be to attach probabilities to information, but that would be too much for most readers, and impossible to do for most normal jounalists. some scientific reporting takes the approach of defining certain words to represent confidence (probability) ranges: “we are weakly confident”… “moderately confident”… etc. they often explicitly define the range, too. that’s the case e.g. in IPCC reports, which is technical material that way more people i know than normal read. i don’t think qualifiers like ”weakly”/“strongly” get in the way, but they do show just how uncertain most effects actually are. people don’t always share information out of altruism. frequently, information is shared in an attempt to persuade. and so there’s selective pressure for writing which makes a situation seem more black/white. if you want quality communication at scale i’m not sure if your bigger priority would be introducing probabilities, or rather aligning everyone using the communication channel to value truth. Wikipedia does a far better job at presenting good information than most of the press, despite lacking probabilities.
  - someweirdperson 4y ago
    > i don’t think qualifiers like ”weakly”/“strongly” get in the way, but they do show just how uncertain most effects actually are. "Most" seems to caused by selection bias. There is new areas where knowlegde has to be established first. Theories can be created, and experiments defined to confirm or reject them. But it takes time. That's the realm of fast tracking results the original article is about. The temporary results will be replaced later. Covid is such a case (even if ethics may get in the way of some experiments). "Most" of science is like this. Then there's areas that cannot be verified by experiment. Probabilities are useful there, too, even more so, because they will persist long-term, even if there is consensus. Main examples are climate (no control group of earths to conduct experiments on) and cosmology (no control group of universes).
booleandilemma 4y ago
The article reminds me of one of Clarke's Three Laws: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right. When they state that something is impossible, they are very probably wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
k__ 4y ago
When I see TV interviews with the average citizen, I'm not sure if there's anything everyone knows.
- burrows 4y ago
  How do I determine if someone is an average citizen? And if there is no way for me to determine such, in what way is the phrase “average citizen” meaningful?
  - k__ 4y ago
    choosing people by random should yield the average, right?
    - burrows 4y ago
      Is this just you defining “average person” as someone chosen randomly?
derevaunseraun 4y ago
> Artificial intelligence is a very fast-moving frontier and what (and who) to believe about it is hard for a non-expert to decide. Crypto is another example of a big field that seems to contain conflicting experts. For the lay public it is very hard to know who to believe. The "lay public" doesn't care in the first place. They don't have the time to read various studies and journals to compare conflicting points of view. What they do have time for is news media, and a whole lot of it > But sometimes experts are wrong. And very often, there’ll be another expert who has a different, even contrary, professional opinion on the same subject. So non-experts are left having to decide which expert we want to believe. The non-experts aren't concerned with who to believe, they're concerned about what should be done. Believing something is true != thinking something should be done (ref Hume's is-ought problem). I'm convinced that the author of this isn't complaining that the public has read various conflicting scientific studies and is unable to make a decision, they're complaining because the public is split on what should be done, which is the real source of disagreement What should be done is a moral question that's independent of the results of any single experiment. To propose that a group of experts "decide" what's moral for the rest of society would be analogous to establishing a public religion
- mindslight 4y ago
  Except that information-causality flows both ways. There are those who have a strong self-interested opinion on "what should be done" that would be imprudent for most everyone relative to the factual reality. To convince more people of their preferred action, they work to undermine everyone's belief in the factual reality. So talking about what the public believes, independent of any proposed course of action, ends up being quite relevant.
  - derevaunseraun 4y ago
    > There are those who have a strong self-interested opinion on "what should be done" that would be imprudent for most everyone relative to the factual reality. To convince more people of their preferred action, they work to undermine everyone's belief in the factual reality. So talking about what the public believes, independent of any proposed course of action, ends up being quite relevant. You mention a "factual reality" in an area of disagreement but there is no such thing prior to the establishment of a consensus. The phrase "undermine everyone's belief in the factual reality" is misleading because it assumes that there is already some established consensus that is being undermined prior to its own establishment. But of course, one of the ways to establish a consensus is to talk about it as if it were already established and legitimate > So talking about what the public believes, independent of any proposed course of action, ends up being quite relevant. I think that talking about consensus can be useful, but I've yet to find an example of anyone discussing what the public "believes" in complete disinterest and without some implicit course of action
colinsane 4y ago
> Is there a way to arrive at a proto-consensus fast — without leaving out the real contingent that everything we know is wrong? possibly some form of prediction market? explicitly reward (give more power to) individuals who are repeatedly correct about the future, and over time such people gain more influence and the overall predictions become more reliable. there have been small-scale prediction markets throughout covid (“what will be the daily case count on 1 August 2022 as reported by CDC?”). that naive approach has some obvious conflict of interest/opportunity for exploitation. but it sounds worthwhile for someone to explore how quickly the various prediction markets have converged throughout their relatively short history, to see if there’s anything there.
swayvil 4y ago
Everyone knows that knowledge is more important than reality.
yarg 4y ago
We cannot rely on experts when we lack the minimum expertise to identify them. I've seen this play out in companies; businessmen in positions to promote technical people, often making some very poor decisions.
- atleta 4y ago
  You don't need to identify who is an expert and who is not by yourself: experts (scientists) compete with and cross validate each-other. I.e. experts themselves will self-select who qualifies as experts. And since there are a lot of them and there is also a pretty strong competition it's pretty unreasonable to say that there is somehow a large conspiracy because it should have to involve basically everyone. And not just in one field! E.g. sometimes climate change denialists say that climate science is not even real science and that these people are just self proclaimed scientists. But the thing is that all fields of sciences (at least all natural sciences, engineering and mathematics) are interrelated. All of these have boundaries touching each other and all fields will have at least some scientists working on these boundaries with people from another field. So no field can simply fake it. In other words, basically everyone who has published in the past few decades will have a finite Erdos number :). Also, not only you can trust the experts, but you don't really have any other sane/viable choice. > I've seen this play out in companies; businessmen in positions to promote technical people, often making some very poor decisions. This is true. What I say to people (small business owners or startup founders) is that you can't pick a co-founder, a tech lead or even a good subcontractor without having the technical knowledge yourself. But that's pretty a different issue. First of all, here you need to pick a specific person for a specific role where you'll then have (want) to trust all (most) of their decisions and you don't have anyone to compare these to. Also, it's many decisions based on a small amount of data. While what we are talking about is listening to experts who mostly say the same thing (the scientific consensus) and it's a very few decisions based on a huge amount of data (research, experiments). There are, of course, times when the consensus has not settled, when experts won't agree, but then you know that they don't know enough yet.
  - inkblotuniverse 4y ago
    Or when all the experts are saying the same thing, and they're all wrong.
moron4hire 4y ago
> Everyone knows how many letters in the alphabet On two, completely separate occasions, I have had very long, very mind-numbing arguments with supposedly college-educated people that tried to assert "in their day" the alphabet had only 25 letters. I have been accused of vandalizing Wikipedia by these people.
rendall 4y ago
This also serves as an argument against using expert consensus as the yardstick to determine that which can be discussed or shared over social media.
iconjack 4y ago
In my opinion, a fair evaluation of "expert" opinion, at least over the last decade or so, would conclude experts are almost worthless. I have no doubt there are true experts in the world, who's analysis and predictions do much better than monkeys throwing darts, but the landscape is so littered with grifters, and there is such a lack of fair scorekeeping, that identifying true experts is impossible. Most certainly that is true when it comes to politics, and unfortunately just about everything, including a lot of science, is just politics pretending to be otherwise, whether it be covid, global warming, economics, what have you.
- ndr 4y ago
  This book[0] documents a researcher doing exactly that, and it confirms your opinion. It's what fueled Superforcasting, and most of what legitimizes prediction markets [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/89158.Expert_Political_Judgment https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/89158.Expert_Political_J...
scalablenotions 4y ago
This overstates the difficulty of crowd-sourcing expert consensus. Even if two percent of experts are saying "!X" about the pandemic, then yes, that's still a lot of people and it's easy to find one to counter mainstream opinion "X". However, if you filter inept science journalism, populist narrative, etc., and listen to experts in relevant fields, it's pretty easy very early on to identify the 98%-ish consensus. The 2% of "everyone" who doesn't know the earth is round, doesn't really impede the reliability of everyone knowing the world is round. Likewise, the "what every expert knows" (maybe not futurist prophesying, but at least about what is true today) is accessible, useful and pretty up-to-date.
t0bia_s 4y ago
Our developed society is commanded by experts too much. If we make decisions on information, that are given to us and forget to confront that information with reality around us, we are lost as free human beings. Conformity behaviour based on science is real threat for democracy.
perilunar 4y ago
For shame HN, not a single reference to the Leonard Cohen song in either TFA or these comments? Oh well, that's how it goes, I guess.

75 points by birriel 4y ago

bckr 4y ago

this is another post that I wish went beyond the idea it is proposing and gave some researched stances on that idea, like who was more right at the beginning of covid and how they are different from people who were less right

marcosdumay 4y ago
Ouch, I think nobody will like the answer to this. It's just my impression, obviously, because I haven't done any formal research on this, but looks like the actual experts know how much they know and how much they don't know, and were quite fine since the start. Also, every single channel that turns their opinions into advice or policy is noisy by an absurd level. So much that what experts think isn't even relevant to predict their results.
- bckr 4y ago
  I have no real opinions other than remembering that advice around masking changed a lot. So I'm genuinely curious.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    That first advice about masks, when every expert expected them to work was a bit damning but not all of the problem. Have you noticed that the public still doesn't know that surface cleaning isn't relevant? Or that masks on open spaces were deemed essential until the policy just shifted to agree with the public actions, without the gained expertise being used at all? (They are useful in crowds, and useless outside of one.) Or that ventilation is essential in closed spaces? But it didn't stop on that. There was just no useful communication of how crowd immunity worked, just some shit from the crazy "let's kill people" ones, and how it related to vaccines. The result is that the public was surprised by it going down when it did, and in a larger way by the shape of the omicron spread. And on the subject of vaccines, there was no communication at all about the safety of them... what is unsettling, because they are safe to a nearly absurd level (all the ones used on the West, including the one that got suspended everywhere due to unexpected risks.) Overall, if we had the same pandemic again, the public would be none the wise on how to protect themselves, or what expect from it. No information reaches the people, ever.
narag 4y ago
I remember most predictions (by "real" experts, at least the ones I paid attention to) were right except one: it will take two years to create a useful vaccine. It was more like six months. Actually I don't remember who they were, I got the impression that there was a consensus, unlike what happened with politicians.

h2odragon 4y ago

> Is there a way to arrive at a proto-consensus fast Yes, you use your individual judgement and go with that; updating as you can. "consensus" here is an appeal to avoid individual responsibility. Embrace the possibility of being wrong (or right) on your own. In the wider civilization context; a society that unites behind one approach to a problem is more likely to fail big than to succeed big. "A free society pulls all kinds of different directions," as Pterry put it. Often the best solutions are only recognized after some crazy shit is tried, but they are recognized as best in part because the crazy shit was tried.

nemothekid 4y ago
>"consensus" here is an appeal to avoid individual responsibility. Embrace the possibility of being wrong (or right) on your own. The problem with hyper-individualism is that some systems only work if everyone is bought in (either willingly or by force). You can't have public schooling without forcing those without kids to pay; and therefore you need people without kids to pay taxes to send kids to school. Likewise you can't build a corporation without achieving some kind of consensus with the people in your organization. That was the problem with COVID. Lockdowns were effectively meaningless if they couldn't be enforced. On a global scale this meant that someone in China who "embraced the possibility of being wrong (or right) on your own" could fly to Italy and wipe out 100,000 people.
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  > You can't have public schooling without forcing those without kids to pay; and therefore you need people without kids to pay taxes to send kids to school. What, no, you definitely can. We already have infra to tax people differently depending on the number of kids they have. There isn't the political will to rest the entire tax burden of supporting public schooling to people with kids, and obviously that would require raising taxes on those with kids to compensate for loss of tax revenue from people without kids, but there's no actual incompatibility here.
  - nemothekid 4y ago

Barrera 4y ago

> Most of “what everyone knows” is true. Most of our knowledge as modern human beings is shared with many others. Everyone knows the capital of France is Paris, and it is true. Everyone knows how many letters in the alphabet, the color of stop lights, the shape of a rainbow. What everyone knows is usually correct. However, sometimes what everyone knows is wrong. Everyone knew humans could not fly, or build 100 stories into the air, or run a company renting out your extra bedroom. Turns out what everyone knows is sometimes wrong. But it is very hard to tell the difference. The affirmative examples are all conventions. We know them to be true because it's within our power to make it so just by agreeing with each other. The negative examples are not conventions. They are about what will happen in the future. So it's not just "sometimes what everyone knows it wrong." More like, on topics involving observation, deduction, or prediction what everyone "knows" is more likely to be wrong than right. The history of science provides ample evidence. Those claiming that "the science is settled" are trying to manipulate the public.

karmakaze 4y ago
Thanks for saying. I couldn't even read the complete article based on the lack of consistency as I don't know what rules of logic apply given the examples. I did skim further and see something about a project at Google and another bad example COVID. The main point that's off isn't that we haven't built good communications for consensus but rather the dominant information flows we've built actively diverge from concensus.
zaik 4y ago
> Those claiming that "the science is settled" are trying to manipulate the public. This line of reasoning is also popular among flat earthers, perpetual motion machine builders and climate change deniers.
- RobertRoberts 4y ago
  Religious tyrants, crusaders and all sorts of dictatorial rulers down through history used this exact same logic. How are current leaders any different using the same reasoning and language?

staz 4y ago

> Everyone knows how many letters in the alphabet I would expect everyone to know that they is more than one alphabet and that they each don't have the same number of letter ...

throwamon 4y ago
Yeah, but I bet most (western?) people don't know the slightly less obvious concept that not all writing systems are alphabets.

kissgyorgy 4y ago

Coronavirus research was not "fast science" at all, there have been ongoing research for decades about coronaviruses before the pandemic hit.

hammock 4y ago
What did it say?

someweirdperson 4y ago

And then there's things that everyone knows and that are wrong. Like famous movie quotes. "I am your father, Luke". Known as the Mandela effect [1]. A fast-mode consensus has a high probability to create lasting wrong "truths", that will be difficult to dispell later. The proper way would be to attach probabilities to information, but that would be too much for most readers, and impossible to do for most normal jounalists. We're doomed in any case. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_Effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_Effect

colinsane 4y ago
> The proper way would be to attach probabilities to information, but that would be too much for most readers, and impossible to do for most normal jounalists. some scientific reporting takes the approach of defining certain words to represent confidence (probability) ranges: “we are weakly confident”… “moderately confident”… etc. they often explicitly define the range, too. that’s the case e.g. in IPCC reports, which is technical material that way more people i know than normal read. i don’t think qualifiers like ”weakly”/“strongly” get in the way, but they do show just how uncertain most effects actually are. people don’t always share information out of altruism. frequently, information is shared in an attempt to persuade. and so there’s selective pressure for writing which makes a situation seem more black/white. if you want quality communication at scale i’m not sure if your bigger priority would be introducing probabilities, or rather aligning everyone using the communication channel to value truth. Wikipedia does a far better job at presenting good information than most of the press, despite lacking probabilities.
- someweirdperson 4y ago
  > i don’t think qualifiers like ”weakly”/“strongly” get in the way, but they do show just how uncertain most effects actually are. "Most" seems to caused by selection bias. There is new areas where knowlegde has to be established first. Theories can be created, and experiments defined to confirm or reject them. But it takes time. That's the realm of fast tracking results the original article is about. The temporary results will be replaced later. Covid is such a case (even if ethics may get in the way of some experiments). "Most" of science is like this. Then there's areas that cannot be verified by experiment. Probabilities are useful there, too, even more so, because they will persist long-term, even if there is consensus. Main examples are climate (no control group of earths to conduct experiments on) and cosmology (no control group of universes).

booleandilemma 4y ago

The article reminds me of one of Clarke's Three Laws: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right. When they state that something is impossible, they are very probably wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

k__ 4y ago

When I see TV interviews with the average citizen, I'm not sure if there's anything everyone knows.

burrows 4y ago
How do I determine if someone is an average citizen? And if there is no way for me to determine such, in what way is the phrase “average citizen” meaningful?
- k__ 4y ago
  choosing people by random should yield the average, right?
  - burrows 4y ago
    Is this just you defining “average person” as someone chosen randomly?

derevaunseraun 4y ago

> Artificial intelligence is a very fast-moving frontier and what (and who) to believe about it is hard for a non-expert to decide. Crypto is another example of a big field that seems to contain conflicting experts. For the lay public it is very hard to know who to believe. The "lay public" doesn't care in the first place. They don't have the time to read various studies and journals to compare conflicting points of view. What they do have time for is news media, and a whole lot of it > But sometimes experts are wrong. And very often, there’ll be another expert who has a different, even contrary, professional opinion on the same subject. So non-experts are left having to decide which expert we want to believe. The non-experts aren't concerned with who to believe, they're concerned about what should be done. Believing something is true != thinking something should be done (ref Hume's is-ought problem). I'm convinced that the author of this isn't complaining that the public has read various conflicting scientific studies and is unable to make a decision, they're complaining because the public is split on what should be done, which is the real source of disagreement What should be done is a moral question that's independent of the results of any single experiment. To propose that a group of experts "decide" what's moral for the rest of society would be analogous to establishing a public religion

mindslight 4y ago
Except that information-causality flows both ways. There are those who have a strong self-interested opinion on "what should be done" that would be imprudent for most everyone relative to the factual reality. To convince more people of their preferred action, they work to undermine everyone's belief in the factual reality. So talking about what the public believes, independent of any proposed course of action, ends up being quite relevant.
- derevaunseraun 4y ago
  > There are those who have a strong self-interested opinion on "what should be done" that would be imprudent for most everyone relative to the factual reality. To convince more people of their preferred action, they work to undermine everyone's belief in the factual reality. So talking about what the public believes, independent of any proposed course of action, ends up being quite relevant. You mention a "factual reality" in an area of disagreement but there is no such thing prior to the establishment of a consensus. The phrase "undermine everyone's belief in the factual reality" is misleading because it assumes that there is already some established consensus that is being undermined prior to its own establishment. But of course, one of the ways to establish a consensus is to talk about it as if it were already established and legitimate > So talking about what the public believes, independent of any proposed course of action, ends up being quite relevant. I think that talking about consensus can be useful, but I've yet to find an example of anyone discussing what the public "believes" in complete disinterest and without some implicit course of action

colinsane 4y ago

> Is there a way to arrive at a proto-consensus fast — without leaving out the real contingent that everything we know is wrong? possibly some form of prediction market? explicitly reward (give more power to) individuals who are repeatedly correct about the future, and over time such people gain more influence and the overall predictions become more reliable. there have been small-scale prediction markets throughout covid (“what will be the daily case count on 1 August 2022 as reported by CDC?”). that naive approach has some obvious conflict of interest/opportunity for exploitation. but it sounds worthwhile for someone to explore how quickly the various prediction markets have converged throughout their relatively short history, to see if there’s anything there.

swayvil 4y ago

Everyone knows that knowledge is more important than reality.

yarg 4y ago

We cannot rely on experts when we lack the minimum expertise to identify them. I've seen this play out in companies; businessmen in positions to promote technical people, often making some very poor decisions.

atleta 4y ago
You don't need to identify who is an expert and who is not by yourself: experts (scientists) compete with and cross validate each-other. I.e. experts themselves will self-select who qualifies as experts. And since there are a lot of them and there is also a pretty strong competition it's pretty unreasonable to say that there is somehow a large conspiracy because it should have to involve basically everyone. And not just in one field! E.g. sometimes climate change denialists say that climate science is not even real science and that these people are just self proclaimed scientists. But the thing is that all fields of sciences (at least all natural sciences, engineering and mathematics) are interrelated. All of these have boundaries touching each other and all fields will have at least some scientists working on these boundaries with people from another field. So no field can simply fake it. In other words, basically everyone who has published in the past few decades will have a finite Erdos number :). Also, not only you can trust the experts, but you don't really have any other sane/viable choice. > I've seen this play out in companies; businessmen in positions to promote technical people, often making some very poor decisions. This is true. What I say to people (small business owners or startup founders) is that you can't pick a co-founder, a tech lead or even a good subcontractor without having the technical knowledge yourself. But that's pretty a different issue. First of all, here you need to pick a specific person for a specific role where you'll then have (want) to trust all (most) of their decisions and you don't have anyone to compare these to. Also, it's many decisions based on a small amount of data. While what we are talking about is listening to experts who mostly say the same thing (the scientific consensus) and it's a very few decisions based on a huge amount of data (research, experiments). There are, of course, times when the consensus has not settled, when experts won't agree, but then you know that they don't know enough yet.
- inkblotuniverse 4y ago
  Or when all the experts are saying the same thing, and they're all wrong.

moron4hire 4y ago

> Everyone knows how many letters in the alphabet On two, completely separate occasions, I have had very long, very mind-numbing arguments with supposedly college-educated people that tried to assert "in their day" the alphabet had only 25 letters. I have been accused of vandalizing Wikipedia by these people.

rendall 4y ago

This also serves as an argument against using expert consensus as the yardstick to determine that which can be discussed or shared over social media.

iconjack 4y ago

In my opinion, a fair evaluation of "expert" opinion, at least over the last decade or so, would conclude experts are almost worthless. I have no doubt there are true experts in the world, who's analysis and predictions do much better than monkeys throwing darts, but the landscape is so littered with grifters, and there is such a lack of fair scorekeeping, that identifying true experts is impossible. Most certainly that is true when it comes to politics, and unfortunately just about everything, including a lot of science, is just politics pretending to be otherwise, whether it be covid, global warming, economics, what have you.

ndr 4y ago
This book[0] documents a researcher doing exactly that, and it confirms your opinion. It's what fueled Superforcasting, and most of what legitimizes prediction markets [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/89158.Expert_Political_Judgment https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/89158.Expert_Political_J...

scalablenotions 4y ago

This overstates the difficulty of crowd-sourcing expert consensus. Even if two percent of experts are saying "!X" about the pandemic, then yes, that's still a lot of people and it's easy to find one to counter mainstream opinion "X". However, if you filter inept science journalism, populist narrative, etc., and listen to experts in relevant fields, it's pretty easy very early on to identify the 98%-ish consensus. The 2% of "everyone" who doesn't know the earth is round, doesn't really impede the reliability of everyone knowing the world is round. Likewise, the "what every expert knows" (maybe not futurist prophesying, but at least about what is true today) is accessible, useful and pretty up-to-date.

t0bia_s 4y ago

Our developed society is commanded by experts too much. If we make decisions on information, that are given to us and forget to confront that information with reality around us, we are lost as free human beings. Conformity behaviour based on science is real threat for democracy.

perilunar 4y ago

For shame HN, not a single reference to the Leonard Cohen song in either TFA or these comments? Oh well, that's how it goes, I guess.