5 ms·

People who are experts (PhD and 20 years of experience) often have very dumb opinions in their field of expertise. Experts make amateur mistakes too. Look at th

by gizmo 2y ago

People who are experts (PhD and 20 years of experience) often have very dumb opinions in their field of expertise. Experts make amateur mistakes too. Look at the books written by expert economists, expert psychologists, expert historians, expert philosophers, expert software engineers. Most books are not worth the paper they're written on, despite the authors being experts with decades of experience in their respective fields. I think you overestimate the ability of a typical 'expert'. You can earn a PhD without the ability to reason critically. You can testify as an expert in a courtroom without understanding conditional probability. Lawyers and accountants in real life also totally contradict themselves when they get asked the same question twice but phrased slightly differently.

parineum 2y ago
> People who are experts (PhD and 20 years of experience) often have very dumb opinions in their field of expertise. And the training data contains all those dumb opinions.
- ulbu 2y ago
  and rehashes it unthinkingly, without an idea of what it means to consider and disagree with it.
indeed30 2y ago
I don't disagree with what you say, but one difference is that we generally hold these people accountable and often shift liability to them when they are wrong (though not always, admittedly), which is not something I have ever seen done with any AI system.
- MacsHeadroom 2y ago
  This sounds like an argument in favor of AI personhood, not an argument against AI experts.
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
Right, but, then what? If you throw away all of the books from experts, what do you do, go out in your backyard and start running experiments to re-create all of science? Or start googling? What, some random person on the internet is going to be a better 'expert' than someone that wrote a book? Books might not be great, but they are at least some minimum bar to reach. You had to do some study and analysis. Seems like any critic of books, if you scratch the surface is just the whole anti-science/anti-education tropes again and again. What is the option? Don't like peer review science, fine, it has flaws, propose an option.
- gizmo 2y ago
  Many terrific books have been published in the past 500 years. The median book is not worth your time, however, and neither is the top 10%. You cannot possibly read everything so you have to be very selective or you will read only dreck. This is the opposite of being anti-science or anti-education.
  - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
    But compared to the content on the internet? So Top 10% of Books. Ok 90 % of Books. marginal, lot of bad. Internet. Just millions of pages of junk. - Books still take some effort. So why not start there. It isn't either/or, binary, a lot of books are bad, so guess I'll learn my medical degree from browsing the web because I don't trust those 'experts'.
    - webmaven 2y ago
      You seem to have excluded the possibility of a "Top 10% of the Internet" tranche.
      - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
        ""Top 10% of the Internet"" What is the top 10% of the Internet that isn't part of some publishing arm of existing media? And, how can you tell? Some dudes blog about vaccines verses Harvard? Which do you believe. Where are the self funded scientific studies that are occurring outside of academia? And thus not 'biased' by the 'elites'. For internet only writing. There aren't a ton of "Astral Codex Ten"'s to draw upon as independent thinkers. And even then, he didn't sprout out of the ether fully formed, he has a degree, he was trained in academia.
uxhacker 2y ago
A Call to expertise is actually a fallacy. This is because experts can be wrong. The scientific method relies on evidence and reproducible results, not authority alone. Edited to add a reference: see under Appeal to authority. https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/fallacies/ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/fallacies/
- mycall 2y ago
  The fact is that in science, facts are only definitions and everything else is a theory which by definition is never 100% true.
  - echoangle 2y ago
    > everything else is a theory which by definition is never 100% true. Which definition of theory includes that it can never be 100% true? It can't be proven to be true, but surely it could be true without anyone knowing about it.
hengheng 2y ago
My personal criterion for calling somebody an expert, or "educated", or a "scholar" is that they have any random area of expertise where they really know their shit. And as a consequence, they know where that area of expertise ends. And they know what half-knowing something feels like compared to really knowing something. And thus, they will preface and qualify their statements. LLMs don't do any of that. I don't know if they could, I do know it would be inconvenient for the sales pitch around them. But the people that I call experts distinguish themselves not by being right with their predictions a lot, but rather by qualifying their statements with the degree of uncertainty that they have. And no "expert system" does that.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > And as a consequence, they know where that area of expertise ends. And they know what half-knowing something feels like compared to really knowing something. And thus, they will preface and qualify their statements. How do you count examples like Musk, then? He is very cautious about rockets, and all the space science people I follow and hold in high regard, say he's actually a domain expert there. He regularly expectation-manages experimental SpaceX launches downward. He's also very bold and brash about basically everything else; the majority of people I've seeing saying he's skilled in any other area have turned out to not themselves have any skills in those areas, while the people who do have expertise say he's talking nonsense at best and is taking wild safety risks at worst.
  - hengheng 2y ago
    Musk is probably really good at back of the envelope calculations. The kind that lets you excel in first year physics. That skill puts you above a lot of people in finance and engineering when it comes to quickly assessing an idea. It is also a gimmick, but I respect it. My wild guess is that he uses that one skill to find out who to believe among the people he hires. The rest of the genius persona is growing up with enough ego that he could become a good salesman, and also badly managed autism and also a badly managed drug habit. Seeing him dabble in politics and social media shows instantly how little he understands the limits of his knowledge. A scholar he is not.
- 2y ago
fn-mote 2y ago
Frankly, I'm not sure what the point of the parent's comment is. Experts can be dumb and ChatGPT is dumb so it's an expert? > People who are experts (PhD and 20 years of experience) often have very dumb opinions in their field of expertise. The conventional wisdom is that experts are dumb OUTSIDE of their fields of expertise. I don't know about you, but I would be very insulted by someone passing judgement like this on my own work in my field. I am sure that I would doubt their qualifications to even make the judgement. Are there experienced fools? Sure. We both probably work with some. To me they are not experts, though.
throw4847285 2y ago
The fact that humans make mistakes has little to no bearing on their capacity to create monumental intellectual works. I recently finished The Power Broker by Robert Caro, and found a mistake in the acknowledgements where he mixed up two towns in New York. Does that invalidate his 500+ interviews and years of research? No. Also, expert historians, philosophers psychs, etc. aren't judged based on their correctness, but on their breadth and depth of knowledge and their capacity to derive novel insights. Some of the best works of history I've read are both detailed and polemical, trying to argue for a new framework for understanding a historical epoch that shifts how we understand our modern world. I don't know, I think I know very little about the world and there are people who know far more and I appreciate reading what they have to say, of course with a critical eye. It seems to me that disagreeing with that is just regurgitated anti-intellectualism, which is a coherent position, but it's good to be honest about it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by gizmo 2y ago

parineum 2y ago

> People who are experts (PhD and 20 years of experience) often have very dumb opinions in their field of expertise. And the training data contains all those dumb opinions.

ulbu 2y ago
and rehashes it unthinkingly, without an idea of what it means to consider and disagree with it.

indeed30 2y ago

I don't disagree with what you say, but one difference is that we generally hold these people accountable and often shift liability to them when they are wrong (though not always, admittedly), which is not something I have ever seen done with any AI system.

MacsHeadroom 2y ago
This sounds like an argument in favor of AI personhood, not an argument against AI experts.

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

Right, but, then what? If you throw away all of the books from experts, what do you do, go out in your backyard and start running experiments to re-create all of science? Or start googling? What, some random person on the internet is going to be a better 'expert' than someone that wrote a book? Books might not be great, but they are at least some minimum bar to reach. You had to do some study and analysis. Seems like any critic of books, if you scratch the surface is just the whole anti-science/anti-education tropes again and again. What is the option? Don't like peer review science, fine, it has flaws, propose an option.

gizmo 2y ago
Many terrific books have been published in the past 500 years. The median book is not worth your time, however, and neither is the top 10%. You cannot possibly read everything so you have to be very selective or you will read only dreck. This is the opposite of being anti-science or anti-education.
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  But compared to the content on the internet? So Top 10% of Books. Ok 90 % of Books. marginal, lot of bad. Internet. Just millions of pages of junk. - Books still take some effort. So why not start there. It isn't either/or, binary, a lot of books are bad, so guess I'll learn my medical degree from browsing the web because I don't trust those 'experts'.
  - webmaven 2y ago
    You seem to have excluded the possibility of a "Top 10% of the Internet" tranche.
    - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
      ""Top 10% of the Internet"" What is the top 10% of the Internet that isn't part of some publishing arm of existing media? And, how can you tell? Some dudes blog about vaccines verses Harvard? Which do you believe. Where are the self funded scientific studies that are occurring outside of academia? And thus not 'biased' by the 'elites'. For internet only writing. There aren't a ton of "Astral Codex Ten"'s to draw upon as independent thinkers. And even then, he didn't sprout out of the ether fully formed, he has a degree, he was trained in academia.

uxhacker 2y ago

A Call to expertise is actually a fallacy. This is because experts can be wrong. The scientific method relies on evidence and reproducible results, not authority alone. Edited to add a reference: see under Appeal to authority. https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/fallacies/ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/fallacies/

mycall 2y ago
The fact is that in science, facts are only definitions and everything else is a theory which by definition is never 100% true.
- echoangle 2y ago
  > everything else is a theory which by definition is never 100% true. Which definition of theory includes that it can never be 100% true? It can't be proven to be true, but surely it could be true without anyone knowing about it.

hengheng 2y ago

My personal criterion for calling somebody an expert, or "educated", or a "scholar" is that they have any random area of expertise where they really know their shit. And as a consequence, they know where that area of expertise ends. And they know what half-knowing something feels like compared to really knowing something. And thus, they will preface and qualify their statements. LLMs don't do any of that. I don't know if they could, I do know it would be inconvenient for the sales pitch around them. But the people that I call experts distinguish themselves not by being right with their predictions a lot, but rather by qualifying their statements with the degree of uncertainty that they have. And no "expert system" does that.

ben_w 2y ago
> And as a consequence, they know where that area of expertise ends. And they know what half-knowing something feels like compared to really knowing something. And thus, they will preface and qualify their statements. How do you count examples like Musk, then? He is very cautious about rockets, and all the space science people I follow and hold in high regard, say he's actually a domain expert there. He regularly expectation-manages experimental SpaceX launches downward. He's also very bold and brash about basically everything else; the majority of people I've seeing saying he's skilled in any other area have turned out to not themselves have any skills in those areas, while the people who do have expertise say he's talking nonsense at best and is taking wild safety risks at worst.
- hengheng 2y ago
  Musk is probably really good at back of the envelope calculations. The kind that lets you excel in first year physics. That skill puts you above a lot of people in finance and engineering when it comes to quickly assessing an idea. It is also a gimmick, but I respect it. My wild guess is that he uses that one skill to find out who to believe among the people he hires. The rest of the genius persona is growing up with enough ego that he could become a good salesman, and also badly managed autism and also a badly managed drug habit. Seeing him dabble in politics and social media shows instantly how little he understands the limits of his knowledge. A scholar he is not.
2y ago

fn-mote 2y ago

Frankly, I'm not sure what the point of the parent's comment is. Experts can be dumb and ChatGPT is dumb so it's an expert? > People who are experts (PhD and 20 years of experience) often have very dumb opinions in their field of expertise. The conventional wisdom is that experts are dumb OUTSIDE of their fields of expertise. I don't know about you, but I would be very insulted by someone passing judgement like this on my own work in my field. I am sure that I would doubt their qualifications to even make the judgement. Are there experienced fools? Sure. We both probably work with some. To me they are not experts, though.

throw4847285 2y ago

The fact that humans make mistakes has little to no bearing on their capacity to create monumental intellectual works. I recently finished The Power Broker by Robert Caro, and found a mistake in the acknowledgements where he mixed up two towns in New York. Does that invalidate his 500+ interviews and years of research? No. Also, expert historians, philosophers psychs, etc. aren't judged based on their correctness, but on their breadth and depth of knowledge and their capacity to derive novel insights. Some of the best works of history I've read are both detailed and polemical, trying to argue for a new framework for understanding a historical epoch that shifts how we understand our modern world. I don't know, I think I know very little about the world and there are people who know far more and I appreciate reading what they have to say, of course with a critical eye. It seems to me that disagreeing with that is just regurgitated anti-intellectualism, which is a coherent position, but it's good to be honest about it.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]