The bit I struggled with is that in many fields, either the majority are wrong/don't have the solution (Argumentum ad populum) or otherwise listening to expertise/experience can either give you too much input or, again, implies that there is more chance that experience will give you a better solution to a problem. In their example, if Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis had asked his more experienced peers about approaching the problem of infections, they would have told him he was barking up the wrong tree with hand washing.
The really difficult part of any venture is knowing how to distinguish wise advice from just another opinion.
Many great solutions come from people with "crazy" thinking and I would expect they could have caused great damage (or perhaps have - jet engines) but otherwise we would be moving very slowly as a planet?
The downside is that most "crazy" thinking produces crazy results.
Take Thanos: with one snap of the fingers he destroys 50% of the intelligent beings in the universe and ends all of the problems associated with overpopulation, right?
But, to quote a story I heard somewhere, if you have a coke bottle in a landfill growing bacteria, who double in population in 30 minutes, such that the number of bacteria will overwhelm the available resources at 12:00 noon, when is the bottle half-full? 11:30. At 11:00 they look around and 3/4th of the bottle is free. If they find another identical bottle next to them, that prevents the crash...until 12:30.
Thanos is a complete idiot.
On the other hand, sure, the majority may be completely wrong, but if you ignore them, your solution probably isn't going anywhere.
Unless the universe will only continue to support life for less than that constant amount of time. A temporary fix is permanent, for sufficiently large values of "temporary." (See also: UUIDs.)
> The really difficult part of any venture is knowing how to distinguish wise advice from just another opinion.
The usual advice is to choose a trusted advisor with lots of experience in the field, listen to and follow his advice and see if it works. If it doesn’t, adapt.
Every other way is wallowing in indecision, losing time.
A decision won’t get better with ten opinions of which more than half are unfounded or even incorrect to begin with.
I find the claim that the majority are wrong in fields tough to believe. Not impossible, mind. Just tough.
I would think it matters on what is "right." Are they wrong in the way that Newton was wrong? Still far more correct that anyone else? (Obviously, not to that degree.)
Take, for example, an electronics or hardware project. The majority is a bunch of experienced engineers who will tell you that your project will take years based on their own experience with an earlier project. What they neglect to account for is that their earlier project took years because of the state of the art at the time. They're taking experience that applies to the era of NAND flash and board bring-up and applying it to the era of eMMC and main-line Linux drivers. So while their estimate is very conservative, it is also very wrong and you should take it with a grain of salt.
Any judgement that relies on some external context, like the industry state of the art, can no longer be trusted in a different context.
The hardest part of talking with experts is to make sure they answer the same question as you want answered.
"How quickly can we get something that more or less works for a demo?" is very different from "When will this be ready for mass production?" They can't read your mind and often to consider context you are not even aware of.
There is also a bit on the what question are people answering, aspect. How long will it take to take pretty much any electronic product to production? Quite a while. How long would it take you to build a prototype that you can play with? Probably not long at all.
The majority are not wrong by definition but the fallacy is that you cannot assume that the majority are right.
As far as knowledge is concerned, was Newton right for a period until we learned about quantum mechanics or was he always wrong? Was he always right but only within limits that he couldn't know in advance?
Apologies for the philosophy but this is the real complexity of an article about avoiding harm by doing various "good practice" stuff!
“He who knows he is a fool is not the biggest fool; he who knows he is confused is not in the worst confusion. The man in the worst confusion will end his life without ever getting straightened out; the biggest fool will end his life without ever seeing the light. If three men are traveling along and one is confused, they will still get where they are going - because confusion is in the minority. But if two of them are confused, then they can walk until they are exhausted and never get anywhere - because confusion is in the majority.”
― Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu
I don't know if I would agree that the majority can't be wrong by definition. I just find it an odd and strong claim. I suspect I misunderstand the point.
What is the claim "the majority are wrong/don't have the solution" meant to support? If I just emphasized on the "wrong" instead of "don't have the solution", apologies.
For Newton, he was always wrong based on his equations abilities to predict everything. He was just closer than many before that point such that it was undetectable for a long time.
Which is my point in asking. If folks are correct in their predictive and application based metrics, it is somewhat silly to belabor them being "wrong" in some absolute sense.
> Many great solutions come from people with "crazy" thinking and I would expect they could have caused great damage (or perhaps have - jet engines) but otherwise we would be moving very slowly as a planet?
I agree. There's something I like to call Asimov's principle[1]: knowledge almost never does harm; the answer to poor or incomplete knowledge is almost always more knowledge (corrections, extensions, alternatives) instead of forgetting.
And there is the possibility of trying to forget in case a knowledge would be so absolutely harmful -- so the downside is practically bounded while the upside is practically unbounded. If you try to hide something harmful it's always possible it will be rediscovered later in very poor timing and the benefit of countermeasures won't be available. If we refrain from discussing AI safety in fear of derailing some holy discussion by the wise sages (what criteria would make anyone good enough to disrupt it?), it seems it'll be more likely when potent general AI emerges we're not ready.
If Einstein tried to hide the mass-energy equivalence, or say all of his theories because of mass-energy equivalence, then when someone later discovered it could be much worse -- if atomic bombs were discovered in the cold war (discoveries usually start unilaterally), one side could very well have started WW3 (in fact the US nearly started a war with USSR in the short period they were the sole possessors of the bomb). The fact is it is extremely hard to predict the impact of any individual action, while it seems quite safe to say that in general thoughtful action is usually benign -- this suggests a strong benefit to discussion and discovery of knowledge versus hiding in fear.
An important principle I would suggest instead is commitment to truth. You can make poor arguments, you can be wrong, but as long as you're committed to truth even the incorrect arguments might prove useful -- they might lead to stronger counterarguments, elucidation of fundamentals, etc.
To exemplify, one of the individuals that perhaps most advanced our understanding of Quantum Mechanics was again Einstein, which was a great critic of it -- his criticisms turned out to be all wrong, but they were so strong (intuitively seemingly right) they brought to light the most interesting features, 'weirdness' of the theory. Even for relativity one of the most useful ways of grasping the theory and its implications is by examining "paradoxes" -- which are essentially failed counterarguments.
This failure of commitment to truth is where climate change deniers ("""skeptics""") go wrong -- it's not trying to prove consensus wrong that's harmful, it is failure to adjust in face of mountains of evidence. Reasonable skepticism probably wasn't so harmful when its impact was less clear -- we've improved our models, measurements, etc to address it.
[1] He makes essentially this argument as a foreword to some of his short stories, can't remember which one exactly. I believe it was more or less along the lines of: science and technology (brought by knowledge, discovery) can often be used for great good or great harm, but to reliably avoid the great harm (that could also come from inaction) we usually need more knowledge, more discussion.
And note how my examples are for very impactful work in the brink of wars and political stability, and still discussion and knowledge seems to have been positive. How many people really should worry about the risk of triggering catastrophe from their daily jobs? Some of the points in the article might be applicable, in very restrict cases -- basically if you're dealing with catastrophic scenarios (how many people routinely are exposed to that?). If you ever find a flashing red button while alone in a power station, or find a break for a major cryptographic protocol, you want to triple check with specialists and be very careful. Otherwise it can turn into futile paralization by fear (which is harmful to yourself and others).
The really difficult part of any venture is knowing how to distinguish wise advice from just another opinion.
Many great solutions come from people with "crazy" thinking and I would expect they could have caused great damage (or perhaps have - jet engines) but otherwise we would be moving very slowly as a planet?