One thing a coworker said once that I think about a lot: ever read an article about a subject that you know a bit about, and invariably you come to the conclusion that the writer doesn't really have a good grasp on what they're talking about. Now think about all the articles you read about subjects that you don't know much about, why would the accuracy be any higher on those ones?
I've been thinking about this recently with internet comments on here, reddit, etc. There are very few topics on which I'd consider myself an expert, but whenever one comes up, the "top" comment (often something contrarian/snarky) is always significantly incorrect.
100%. It's extra disastrous when the topic is polarizing or charged. The topic of US politics for example will very often work off of some false dichotomy or fundamentally flawed premise and twist into some horribly deformed conversation.
Try telling someone that "the process of voting doesn't work that way" or try to clear up some common misconception about the economy or crime and it just doesn't go anywhere. People have a lot of false assurance to back up their mode of thinking and it is nearly impossible to break that. In fact, there is an entire economy in vindicating people's beliefs which makes people even more assured.
I'm convinced the only proper stance on complex ideas, concepts and topics is that we shouldn't have the hubris to think that we completely understand something or even have a solid grasp.
Keep in mind that people don't talk about that which they believe they completely understand. When someone reaches a satisfiable conclusion in understanding, they lose interest in the subject and move on to something else.
The political discourse around polarizing topics isn't disastrous. It takes place exactly because people realize that they are complex issues not fully understood, and are talking about it in hopes that more information will come to light to help them reach a greater understanding. This is why the more complex the issue, the more it will keep coming up over and over.
human beings are bad at gathering information, inferring the right things from it, and responsibly passing it on to others. It is incredible what we’ve achieved in spite of this
All was achieved when it was widely not so, and by people not affected by this.
Thank you. This is a refreshing take on much of human interaction.
As a teacher in middle school I see this demonstrated throughout my classes. I have even started collecting data points on how many times a week a topic or topic adjacent to another topic crops up as discussions in my class. There are almost always heated discussions, but in the end we typically come to an understanding about facts or how we can’t truly know fully situations. There are of course some holds outs, but for the majority we find understanding or compromise.
With regards to politics, wasn't that found to be a Russian active measures tactic where they'd get low quality or inaccurate comments up voted to the top, down vote actual informative comments, and flood their up voted comments with low quality replies and threads to push the informative stuff so low that users likely will give up scrolling before they see it?
They just enhance it, the division and polarisation already exist, what Russia has learned is that if they press those buttons hard enough they make our democracies ungovernable.
They aren't causing it, just furthering our issues for their own goals, and unfortunately it's working pretty well.
I think this is a significant contribution to imposter syndrome. It took me a long time in life to realize that the confidence some people have in their opinions rarely comes from true expertise; rather, it comes from their personality.
Are you claiming expertise in computing or non-computing topics? HN tends to be - as we might expect - quite good at computers and bad/average [0] at everything else.
I'd assume it is the same logic as comparative advantages in economics; it doesn't make sense for communities to become experts in everything. The only caveat is that people in the chattering communities (eg, journalists, influencers, celebrities) are some of the last to look to for informed opinions on reality since their speciality is attracting attention and telling stories rather than anything linked to success in the physical or academic worlds. They're often clever, just not involved in complex topics.
[0] average = bad. Goes to show how catastrophic dictatorships are that a democracy can consistently outperform one.
Democracies function on the notion that most people have no idea what they're talking about, and vote randomly. The few who do know what they're talking about will all vote the same way, so most of the time the right answer will prevail.
There are a lot of problems with that assumption. Thus far it seems to work out better than the alternatives, but we'll have to see if that continues to hold.
I don’t think that’s true. I’m pretty sure the hope is that people are reasonably well informed. And anyway, we’re voting on representatives, not specific issues, for the most part. (I mean clearly referenda exist, but they aren’t the main thing). Or we’re voting on matters of preference, in which case the populace is essentially correct whatever their decision.
Yes, but false reporting isn't coming from just one side is it, it's something all sides can participate in. The way the education system is right now along with societal expectations, people are going to be misinformed rather than admitting to be uninformed.
In the absolute sense yes, but this thread was framed in comparison to undemocratic systems. The media aren't biased in the direction of making their host country worse off, so their biases aren't negative in that sense. We'd get better outcomes if people in the public discourse held themselves to higher standards; but their low standards don't stop the tendency of marginal voters to bias on rational decision making.
The media aren't biased in the direction of making their host country worse off
i don't believe that. at least western media are biased towards majority and conservative views and for profit entities, ignoring or even suppressing minorities and that is making us worse off.
Conservative views are things that worked in the past though. For profit entities are all dedicated to satisfying the needs and wants of people and are part of society too. >90% of all the gains since the industrial revolution came from for-profit entities so it is a stretch to say they are biased in favour of making things worse. Minorities are, by definition, not a group that includes most people so things can get really brutal for them before it starts hurting the greater society.
These are all biases that may be politically undesirable to you (the corporate media are basically the vanguard of class warfare, so they should be undesirable to a bunch of people), but they aren't biased in the direction of making things worse at the highest level of abstraction. A rising tide benefits all ships.
That is indeed one of the problems I mentioned in the last paragraph. We are stressing the limits of how much misinformation democracy can handle. We might well be over it.
> HN tends to be - as we might expect - quite good at computers and bad/average [0] at everything else.
Who's we? I don't expect that at all. "computers" is such a broad subject, with countless areas of specialty, and in my experience HN commenters are often, all too often, quite ignorant of my particular areas of specialty, though that doesn't stop them from overconfidentally asserting falsehoods about those subjects.
Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy: "Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge."[0]
This is why I'm rather bemused when people "freak out" about LLMs hallucination rates. The number of comments I've seen on Hacker news (ostensibly the intellectual sister of reddit) that make extraordinarily confident outlandish claims about various subjects with zero citations, sources, etc across what would otherwise be considered highly scientific disciplines - neuroscience is a particularly egregious offender - is far more worrisome to me than the latest hallucination from Gemini.
My experience working at Apple on both Music and Maps: anything that I had worked on that was reported on was usually wildly inaccurate. Mainstream news, bloggers, HN comments... so much assumption and usually way off.
Covid was the litmus test for me. I happened to know a lot about a lot of topics that became wildly reported on, from virology to immunology, and I had to watch in horror as every single media presence and expert weighed in with at best non-existent data to support major changes to existing wisdom, and at worst (and most common) obvious lies that contradicted not just available science but the very nature of how viruses operate.
For me, it’s often a case of semantics. Like, if I watch a YouTube car repair video, and the presenter is diagnosing an issue and says something like “ok, so we can see here the battery is draining far too quickly so I better check the alternator first,” in my experience, it’s rarely the alternator and often either a bad battery or a short somewhere. My first check is either of those two things. I might eventually arrive at the alternator but it’s all just semantics and interpretation at a certain level. I don’t feel like they’re breathtakingly _wrong_, they just probably have had a different experience than me, leading them to a different conclusion.
Caveat: I often work on old cars where a short is far more likely.
The accuracy of other articles can be higher or lower because other people researched and wrote them. This is why people tend to have favorite reporters and favorite news outlets. They do not trust every thing they read, they look for people who seem to reliably report the truth as they know it, and those people/outlets they _tend_ to trust. People are naturally skeptical. Often they just read to entertain themselves or to gather topics to discuss with friends or coworkers later. That doesn't mean they believe it all. You can read all the UFO articles but that doesn't mean you believe in UFO's. You might instead find them interesting as a sign that the military ignoring UFO's mean enemy spy drones can easily sneak in and spy on maneuvers, a big vulnerability that the military is _supposed_ to be cognizant of, but is apparently ignoring.
I never really knew about, or thought about, this phenomenon until I started trying code generated by ChatGPT. Then I started to realize ChatGPT's answers seemed really good for programming languages I knew little about, but pretty bad for programming languages I knew a lot about.
Then I realized this probably applies to many different subjects.
> Now think about all the articles you read about subjects that you don't know much about, why would the accuracy be any higher on those ones?
Why wouldn't the accuracy be higher? Extrapolating that way from limited experience is not something I would personally do. I would read everything, learn gradually, and continue learning and testing information with experiments and more information.
In the context of articles the answer is simple: because the journalist isnt the specialist, they likely just interviewed a few people and wrapped it up the article.
For comments it's a different story. You do occasionally get the real experts, but more often then not, you just get another mediocre human like myself that just voiced their opinion. Furthermore, there is a strong correlation with experts not commenting as they've got better things to do vs the average Joe that is commenting with little effort, essentially outputting significantly more comments.
Another detrimental factor is that mentally unwell people will often output orders of magnitude more comments then everyone else, complicating everything even more.
OP has a point. It depends on your frame. Some areas require far more specialized knowledge than others. If your specialization were something incredibly complex like quantum physics, you'd probably find ridiculous mistakes in 99% of mainstream sources. OTOH, articles about business or tax law may have far fewer lay errors, so you would be mistaken to project the popular information error rate in your own field onto popular reporting in every other field.
At least in theory, while the journalist isn't a subject matter expert, they have spent time reporting on the same domain. They know the people who are experts, and work under an editor who has worked in that field for decades. They should be able to validate any facts and be able to put them into context.
As newspapers have gotten hammered there are fewer and fewer people who actually do that, and more and more bloggers with loud opinions and few facts. Many good sources have gone defunct or given up trying. But there do remain a few sources of decent journalism, where the reporters and editor really are better informed than most laymen.
> You do occasionally get the real experts, but more often then not, you just get another mediocre human like myself that just voiced their opinion
Most of the comments experts make are just stating their own opinions as well. Take any credible expert in any field and you'll find equally credible experts who completely disagree with them. When experts are communicating with non-experts they're often really bad at explaining which points are just their opinions versus more widely accepted facts, and just as bad as explaining what other equally credible expert perspectives exist on a topic other than their own. They also tend to be pretty bad at explaining where the limits of knowledge in their field are as well.
I would suggest that the ego boost of being a highly regarded expert also tends to make these shortcomings worse with a lot of people, that increasing credibility and reputation can have the effect of increasing dogmatic-ness. Of the topics that I'm somewhat well informed about, I know very few "experts" who are good at explaining the perspectives of their field in a reasonably balanced way, I think Roger Penrose is quite good at doing this, but even he's not perfect and experts with his level of humility are not very common.
Sure. I mean, ask most coders what the best programming language or web framework is for a certain job, and they'll tell you it's whichever one they use. It's partly confirmation bias from their workplace, and partly "when all you have is a hammer..."
I have found people receptive to that observation though.
That is, it's not yet a widely noticed thing and I feel it helps to spread it around and people generally seem to welcome and understand the concept. It probably does not immediately change how they read - biases are very hard to fight. But it goes in the right direction.
Absolutely true, but also people who know about a subject often can't see the forest for the trees and an outside perspective brings new detail you haven't seen before.
> As someone that works in the crypto industry, I feel this every time I see the news or articles report on it, or comments here talking about it.
It was the same way during the 90's Dot-Com era, journalists would explain the World Wide Web with word salad, e.g., the "Graphical portion of the Internet".
With regard to Crypto, I decline to discuss it without mentioning the 3Blue1Brown video, sometimes the gambit works and triggers a better discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4
And I love the comments in that video about being "Confused, but on a higher level".
No I'm saying this is a frankly stupid argument to make. Crypto has almost a century of financial crimes, history, and policy to draw on. The fact that they're stepping on the same rakes despite them being labeled is a point against the entire sector. Anyone smart enough to build an alternative financial system is probably doing more legitimate work in the actual financial sector, leaving crypto to 29 year old geniuses who barely understand they're running ponzi schemes.
You're arguing that we should try out this new, unregulated, and terrible alternative financial system that seems to only be filled with such trustworthy people as scam artists, terrorists, drug dealers, and war criminals because a system designed before computers existed sucked ass. Your audacity is shocking.
A blockchain is a distributed public ledger of immutable information. The use cases for that seem clear and obvious: consider all repositories of public information that are either not distributed, and therfore subject to single points of failure, or allow extant data to be modified, and therefore subject to reliability and trust issues. Consider how blockchains might improve all such use cases.
You still have to trust whatever things you rely on upstreams, plus, if the consensus is against you, there's nothing you can do anyway? For example, you got scammed, its written to the ledger. The transaction is immutable and actually, actually did happen. What can you do now?
Large cryptocurrency networks like Bitcoin are extremely hard to execute a 51% attack upon due to their size. Though ultimately there's no perfect solution. As the saying goes, democracy is 2 wolves and 1 sheep deciding on what's for dinner.
But you can't use bitcoin or other blockchains with large cash flows as information storage at scale, since they use them to make transactions first and foremost and can't hold a lot of other data.
For many applications, it's possible to commit just a Merkle tree root hash to the blockchain and still get all the properties you care about, while only using O(1) blockchain storage.
I take the above comment as addressing a use case for blockchain that isn't currency.
The context I think they are proposing blockchain to be useful is in verifiable public information. For information to be verified or analyzed the blockchain can verify the source even offline.
Exactly. E.g. decentralized DNS, title transfers to real property, etc.
It's still extremely useful as currency as well, though, precisely because it actually is digital currency, and allows direct person-to-person transactions via the internet without requiring a proprietary middleman. The previous commenter's complaint about how it doesn't solve anything if you get scammed is a bit off-target, because dealing with frauds and scams isn't a feature inherent in the currency itself -- it applies equally to any payment solution, especially cash and checks -- and is something we deal with via the legal system regardless of how funds are transferred.
> A blockchain is a distributed public ledger of immutable information.
Is it immutable? Forks, 51% attacks, bugs. It it only immutable until consensus decides it isn't immutable, right? If something is immutable, but can be made immutable, is it ever really immutable?
Blockchains facilitate trustless transactions enabling truly decentralized currencies not under the control of any government. Many people find this quite valuable, as evident by recent trends in authoritarian overreach, fiscal repression, and inflation. Privacy optimized cryptocurrencies like Monero also deal with the problem of their blockchain 'providing evidence in court.'
A state doesn’t insure the value of a currency. In order, the largest influences on currency value are:
1. Speculation / belief
2. Approx 10x less influential is trade, most currency transactions both by volume and by value are in speculation which is underpinned and driven by beliefs in a particular currency. Some estimates put trading as low as 2.5% of all forex. Trading does impact the price of a currency, but in miniscule proportions to speculation
3. We can fairly confidently say tax collection is a lower influence than trade because of so many examples (and extraordinarily rare counter examples) but I don’t know of any reasonable way to quantify how much less the effect is. The threat of incarceration and / or asset seizure drives demand for currency which influences its value.
Places like Argentina are fascinating (said while acknowledging the extreme hardship being placed on people who have to use Argentinian currency!). In recent history all of the above have had visible influence on their currency along with pegging / dollarization which attempts to introduce a control on all the above factors with various degrees of success.
The value of Gold is based on scarcity dictated by the laws of Physics, and on people believing it has value. The fascination with that yellow gleam goes as far back as recorded time. The fact that it's easy to work with (malleability, ductility, etc.) probably played a part as well.
The value of Crypto products is based on scarcity dictated by the computationally intensive nature of certain algorithms, and on people believing those products have value.
Gold isn't a currency. Gold coins can be, but then you either have to trust the mint or you carry around a scale. The key is being fungible and it's the state that promises that a dollar bill is equal to any other dollar bill.
That's why I prefer to read books by scientists that are established in the field. Granted, I might miss some spectacular insights that some revolutionists might propose, but I can be relatively sure that most of what I read is actually true in the sense of representing reality relatively accurately.
I described a time where a friend summarized this effect and how it stuck with me since, which is the same effect described in the article? And saying that it's a bummer to think about? I didn't say it was original insight on anyone's part, just that it was a sticky thought when it was wrapped up in a small 1 sentence explanation. You're right, there's no great insight in my comment, all it said was "yea this happens to me too all the time" but for some reason it got upvoted.
Unbelievable how meta the original comment is. Seems like many of the subsequent replies, too. Skim a few paragraphs and that's plenty, time to share your thoughts with the internet...
This passage comes to mind:
> we want so badly to be believed, to be seen as someone who knows stuff.
> Skim a few paragraphs and that's plenty, time to share your thoughts with the internet...
Some articles posted to HN have poor enough quality that reading a few paragraphs is all they deserve. The false premise is usually evident from the first paragraphs, and there's no reason to read further (unless it's one of those articles where the author changes their mind through a long exposition).
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
Normally yes, but I think an exception is allowed in this case due to the irony of the person being oblivious to an article talking about people being oblivious.
For us old timers this is nothing new. For people that know what a 3 digit /. userid is, the meme of not reading the article is as old as internet news boards.
It's like when we see people "do programming" in TV shows/movies and laugh at how goofy it is. I suspect most technical professions are exactly like that, we just don't realize it most of the time.
Even worse when there are slightly creative solutions that haven't reached conventional wisdom status yet. They're out there, but almost impossible to find.
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
Since I've started working in finance, I find all those conspiracies about banks and "wall street" a bit cringe: HSBC is actually a nice bank, they helped me a lot, hedge funds do lose as much money as they make in aggregate across all of them because end of the day it's all a random 0-sum with losers paying winners, inside an investment bank, risk is very managed and boring, deal makers spend lots of time trying to reject proposals, loans are rarely predatory and not always easy to get because nobody wants bad payers, bonuses are scarse, etc.
The headlines about some crisis with uneducated comments about how rich bankers exploit the weaks make me hesitate to trust journalism. Often incompetence is way more prevalent than nefariousness ...
Each time I say stuff like that I get comments saying "maybe but it's not a reason to defend banks", completely missing that it's exactly my point: this hatred of banks is a bit irrational, I think it's fine sometimes to defend them...
The flip side of this is that I’ve repeatedly seen people in some industry subject to new regulation claim that some effect of it is an unfortunate accident (when it’s actually the point, the behavior it’s stopping that you think is good is actually unethical and system-wide contributes to huge problems in ways that ought not be hard to understand) or that much-needed regulation is some terrible mistake that people will regret when we have strong evidence (like, real world examples) to the contrary.
Granted I’ve mostly seen that in the real estate world, so maybe other industries are less-shit about saying plainly dumb stuff based on “insider knowledge” (self-serving bullshit, actually)
See also: cops and all manner of things, like the relative riskiness of their own job (and which parts of it are risky—all that driving is a lot of the risk, and Covid-19 vs guns is a fun comparison for some years) or how dangerous it is to be within one meter of a small amount of fentanyl or whatever, or how we’ll all just super regret it if we keep them from trampling on civil liberties (common view, not making that up)
Sometimes the insiders know better and everyone else is wrong. Sometimes the insiders are all sorts of mixed up over some comically basic shit.
"loans are rarely predatory" misses the point why they are bad. They are bad for the economy because it's you (not the market) who decides who gets resources.
They weren't, they were likely invented in Ancient Rome, and soon recognized as harmful, and were illegal until recently, when they got allowed, and again recognized as harmful during the great depression (the Chicago plan that was never implemented).
The problem is that you only see the gains that those who take a loan get, but it only allows them to circumvent the market, and nothing is in fact created, only the resources get misallocated. Somebody else would use what got bought with the money.
Loans existed for at least as long as writing has, and probably for the entirety of humanity’s history. Code of Hammurabi had laws regulating loans, for example.
Why loans result in resources being misallocated? This doesn’t make sense to me. Say, I have some cash I want to save for retirement. Until then, I loan it to other people to run their businesses. Where is misallocation here?
They buy something for the money. That is the misallocation. They couldn't afford it, and your loan allowed it. Let's say they buy a tractor. The tractor would be bought by somebody else. Or perhaps different machinery would be manufactured, or perhaps something completely different would be done, or nothing at all would be done because people would prefer to have more free time. This is how you get massive market imbalances that lead to the great depression, or Evergrande.
No money is known that was used before classical antiquity, it must be a mistranslation.
Someone buying a tractor on a loan doesn’t take away someone else’s ability to buy a tractor. We have no shortage of tractors. Practically all new tractors today are bought on a loan, by the way.
Imagine what would happen if loans on tractors would not be allowed. Then, someone who needs a tractor would need to rent it, instead of buying it. In that world, pretty much the same people who use tractors now would also use tractors. Tractors use would be similarly allocated as today. The main difference is that instead of a bank earning income by renting you money, it would earn income by renting you tractors. The ultimate outcome would be effectively the same.
Loans is just renting, but instead of renting physical objects, you rent money. If you object to renting money, all your objections should apply to renting physical things. Have you thought of that?
Money isn't a resource that is objectively needed, its role is to regulate economy. You could do anything that you do just as well without it, if people could agree on it. It isn't like a tractor that is needed, and there is no problem with renting tractors. The problem is that you do use money in your example: you use it to store your savings. By lending it,it gets used twice - once to buy the tractor, the second time it's still used to store your savings.
It does take away somebody's ability to buy a tractor, as you buy one, so there is one less, or one extra needs to be manufactured. That can also be a problem - too many tractors can be created, so that food gets so cheap that it's basically free,and the farmers now can't make money. Which is what literally happened in the great deoression.
And now just think of all of the people who will be getting their knowledge from LLMs which are literally making up stuff through statistical linguistic inference on a grand scale from hearsay.
> LLMs are literally making up stuff through statistical linguistic inference on a grand scale from hearsay.
Hearsay being some personal "truth" it may be useful to know what the statistical average of that "truth" is. If we do it right perhaps we can get the various personal errors to cancel out.
Maybe you are referring to articles on the internet that are meant for SEO?
The internal white papers I've written and also help co-author (which are for discourse/dissertation on successful project implementations and to be used as reference for future work), or when on a stint with IBM doing ITSO Redbooks, were (are?) highly accurate, and involved subject matter experts (which, as the name would imply, were the SMEs that people would contact specifically as THE experts in that field; and, back then, we were really the experts).
OK Ok, you can stay on my lawn for a while longer... /j
"As George Orwell said, 'The most fundamental mistake of man is that he thinks he knows what’s going on. Nobody knows what’s going on.'"
(spoiler) The author reveals at the end that this quote was made up and falsely attributed to Orwell.
The most ironic part of this article is that the spurious quote will probably now make its way across the internet, whereas the disclaimer will not. Emerson actually did say “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me” - and after I've forgotten this article, I will probably remember that Orwell said no one knows what's going on.
I know Orwell's work pretty well, and I read that sentence, and thought to myself: "Cant remember where he said anything like that, but what the hell, I haven't read everything Orwell ever wrote". So I just rolled with it.
The cognitive load to fact check everything is too great, so we decide which sources we think are reliable and just accept them. The solution is not to disbelieve everything you are told, but to accept that some of the facts you have not checked might be wrong, and be prepared to re-evaluate when contrary evidence appears.
About 10 years ago I accepted that I didn't know what was going on, and I also realized that even if I did, 98% of it doesn't affect me in the slightest way.
I used to watch the news every day and try to stay informed about politics and candidates and to some extent sports and celebrities and other current events. Now I don't. None of it affects me or my day-to-day life. I'm a lot less stressed about stuff and I have more time for stuff that matters to me.
Just after Russia started to attack Ukraine more intensely again in 2022, there was a chance that Hungary goes into a full blown dictatorship (without voting and such) on the side of Russia. Now, that would have affected me greatly since I’m travelling a ton, and I’m Hungarian, and I was there that time.
Also related to this, I need to pay attention to Hungary some level to tell my parents when to leave. Unfortunately, I started to fail with this, but it’ll be more important again, because the status quo which allowed to pretend democracy is under attack, and we could already see what happens then.
After COVID, it’s even more interesting your statement, because you were affected, and to be effective you had to know what are the “news”. In other words, how people fucked up things. Also, I should have been quite offended why my doctor didn’t want to see me, when I arrived sick from New York two days before the first lockdown there.
Also from the “news” it seems that the general trust between each others plummeted (shrinking number of real life connections, and increasing internet toxicity). That indicates the possibility that democracies are not the optimal strategy on individual level anymore. We need to prepare for that.
Because of the “news” I, my brother and his whole family, and about at least a quarter of my high school class left Hungary (whom I know about). None of these would have happened with the news of the 90s or early 2000s. So it definitely affects larger parts of population.
Since I’ve also started to not read daily news that much, I’m also quite sure that the lack of news is definitely good for my mental health. And I’m definitely more chill. But there is a possibility that I won’t predict something because of this, and I’ll loose money, time, health, or even friendships (I suck with remote connections with my friends).
Given the topic, I assumed the quote was probably false the first time I read it. It pays to be a little paranoid about everything, and hold most of one’s beliefs only shallowly.
what that actually reveals, and explains one of the authors questions, why most things at all still work despite this, is that the particularities of statements don't matter much.
If there's something useful in the made up quote that is why it's going to be proliferated, whether XY said it doesn't matter, there's not really any practical harm in that false attribution. This is also why crowdsourced predictions are remarkable accurate (and in fact often outperform experts, see Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner), despite most members of the crowd being wrong. As long as the wrong people aren't correlated in some way the average is a really good approximation.
Most stuff being noise and only some stuff being signal is just how the world works in general, it's not even really an insight.
A perfect example of this, is stock market reporting. On a daily basis, stocks move, sometimes a lot - but apart from the people who make them move (and even then, it can be impossible for them to know it's them !), nobody knows why.
But a lot of people, without knowledge of finance or economics, want to know *why* stocks moved. And so, we have an entire industry reporting on a daily basis, without any direct knowledge about the thing they are reporting about !
As the author said, there are few penalties for bullshit, and many rewards !
Here's a potentially relevant quote from "The Man Who Solved the Market" by Gregory Zuckerman[0].
"One day, a data-entry error caused the fund to purchase five times as many wheat-futures contracts as it intended, pushing prices higher. Picking up the next day’s Wall Street Journal, sheepish staffers read that analysts were attributing the price surge to fears of a poor wheat harvest, rather than Renaissance’s miscue. [...] “Any time you hear financial experts talking about how the market went up because of such and such—remember it’s all nonsense,” [Peter] Brown [CEO of Renaissance Technologies] later would say."
The day of stock reports are such crap its actually entertaining to read. Especially when the market whiplashes a couple minutes after the midday report and they need to come up with a narrative. Most of the moves could honestly be summed up with “it was noon so a bunch of hft cron jobs turned on right then and bought or sold” or “nice numbers ending in 0 or 5 have their own gravity pull”
> But a lot of people, without knowledge of finance or economics, want to know why stocks moved. And so, we have an entire industry reporting on a daily basis, without any direct knowledge about the thing they are reporting about !
They move due to information about the stock and the perception (which is a type of information) about the stock. But since you don't know when new information about a company/stock will become public, nor when the perceptional information about it will shift, the changes are effectively random:
And if there is new information about it, those that get it first (unlikely to be you) will be able to capitalize on in better; and as it spreads that information will take more and more of an effect on the stock price. To paraphrase William Gibson: the information is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.
Yes, but not always - in the case it goes in the opposite direction, they will write 'investors priced it in already' :D
There are of course tangible things that can help explain movements, but truth is - very very rarely those writing the articles know what's going on on the market.
Another funny thing in the market, mostly recently, is that earnings are announced after hours - and most of the movement happen in those after hours - which doesn't really make sense, since the liquidity is very very limited. So how come that just following the earnings, the price of say Tesla will go +10% in the after hours, and then stay pretty much at that level the next day, when real investors and big funds start trading ? Who knows...
Disagree- plenty of times in my career the company I work for beats/misses guidance and the stock moves in the “wrong” direction. To the point where it was independently a joke in multiple companies
Nobody knows why, because it's meaningless noise. It's just what the stock was traded for in that particular moment, somebody offered to trade for that much and somebody accepted that offer which alone is a meaningless number. You need some longer term average according to volume, not points in time to gain any meaningful information.
My favorite style to dislike is "Fed sees inflation as astronauts are trapped on ISS." They really want to make it sound like a causal relationship, using "as" as "and [with unspoken implications; nudge, wink]" instead of simply posting two articles.
First hand experience is certainly better than second hand accounts bit it can be just as wrong. My example woild be, going to some foreign country, getting a few first hand experiences, then assuming those experiences match the norm in that country when the don't.
All of them, really.
As a tourist, you don't have to work a regular job there, you don't have to rent an apartment or buy a home there, you don't have to deal with the locals on a day-to-day basis, you're usually not aware of the political issues (esp. at the local level). You just go to some popular tourist destinations, take photos, eat in restaurants, walk around a bit, and go home. Of course you're not going to get a very good idea of what it's really like to live there. You can, however, get a good feel for the place, especially if you step outside the tourist zones more, but it's going to be very incomplete because of the factors above.
this is why, when i go somewhere i prefer to either stay with locals couchsurfing, or when i stay longer, rent a room or an apartment. i don't travel around but stay in the same place, make friends with locals, join their events, etc.
i intentionally don't read about the places before going there, to avoid influencing my experience by the subjective reports of others. especially reports of other foreigners.
i'll never experience the life and struggles as a local, especially not when the culture is very different, or the language or its a developing country. at best i get to experience what living in that place as a european, an expat, is like.
but, where i am able to make friends or become part of a local family, i still get way more insights than any tourist would.
while traveling in japan (where i was couchsurfing) i met a young european who claimed to have learned things about japanese culture that generally no foreigner ever finds out and his japanese friends would always be surprised when he told them about some of the things he learned. i could not verify his claim of course, but it was interesting nonetheless.
That's true but it's not like I don't need to feel with those types of issues back at home. Like, how much different is renting an apartment between Paris and London? Once you get into the groove of actually living somewhere, don't you just realize it's the same as everywhere else? It's the special stuff that makes a difference.
>Like, how much different is renting an apartment between Paris and London?
I don't know, but from personal experience, renting and living in an apartment in Tokyo is very, very different from renting an apartment in America.
>Once you get into the groove of actually living somewhere, don't you just realize it's the same as everywhere else?
No, not at all. Different places are extremely different. There's a reason people move emigrate to other countries. I don't know how you got this idea unless you've never even traveled anywhere else. Maybe I don't understand you correctly.
Anyway, if you're just a tourist somewhere, you might not even care what it's like to live in a place; that's probably not why you're there. But it does mean you have a very different experience there than you would as a long-term resident, and it's quite likely very, very different from your experience as a resident back home.
I can't do France and the UK, but I can do Germany and the UK. There's definitely similarities, but there's a lot of differences as well, and the differences are often important. For example, the longer I rent in Germany, the safer I am against being forced out or having my rent arbitrarily raised. That is not true in the UK, where there is very little protection for renters. The types of apartment one can get in the UK and in Germany differ significantly, in everything from the quality of materials to the design of the neighbourhood.
This means that things that will be a significant issue for a tenant in one location will be irrelevant in another location and vice versa. Understanding the issues on the ground usually requires living in that place for a significant amount of time.
My favorite theory about Cambodia is that they subtlely threaten any tourist to post positive feedback about the country otherwise they get the Pol Pot treatment lol
It'd bad to rely on a small selection-biased sample of anything as an indicator of the general case, regardless of whether the sample data is acquired firsthand or secondhand.
Similarly, a lot of people believe in what we could call "ghosts" based on firsthand experience, yet the expert consensus is that there is no such thing.
This is one reason I really enjoyed reading Prometheus Rising. A significant part of the book is dedicated to show you just how little you actually know about reality when you discount beliefs you acquired either extrapolating experiences or simply adopting some dogma (even if it’s simply believing Positivism in science). In the end it’s impossible for us to even assess whether there is a reality out there.
Thank you for the book recommendation, I am going to check it out.
> In the end it’s impossible for us to even assess whether there is a reality out there.
Well, I'd say ontologically / phenomenologically it's basically a sure thing, though whether the nature and ontology of it is anything near what it is said to be is a very different matter!
I've been thinking for a while about the "reality is a simulation" idea. It may not be literally true, but it certainly is useful to try on as a temporary LARP. The more you think of things that way, the more it starts to make sense in a weird way. Nearly all media, that is to say nearly all stimuli/input, is irreflective of reality. Nobody knows what's going on.
I was listening to the latest Lex Friedman podcast from the Amazon jungle and there was an interesting comment that the “reality is a simulation” folks have never had to survive in the Amazon and that the belief is somewhat of a side effect of the relative safety of everyday life.
The realm of the quantum does not care about the Amazonian wildlife and the converse is also true.
The brilliant minds that believe we are indeed in a simulation have extrapolated this concept from the weirdness that is found within the realm of quantum, the realm of the sub micro and nano.
Religious folk believe we live in some sort of simulation as well: "You are travelers and sojourners here. This is not your home. God is of spirit not of flesh."
Don't know what 'spirit' is, but it's not carbon-based matter. Don't know what home is, but it's evidently not here. The Bible suggests that nothing here is real and the only real things are found in the spiritual realm.
Simulation, or manufactured space, it doesn't really matter to us. Like Mr. Friedman pointed out, we have to deal with the space around us and whether the space around us is simulation or not is irrelevant.
A few examples: Junior devs asking about how to do something - sometimes the answer is clear, there's a standard or a decision has already been made - sometimes someone has to do some work to decide how to proceed. Its easy for people to get frustrated when they think they asked a simple question, but at the point they ask, NO ONE knows the answer.
Do masks work? How much evidence of what types would it take to make a satisfying answer to this question? What would those study designs look like? How large would your sample size need to be? I think it would take a great deal of work just to design the studies and get them past ethical review boards, much less get them funded and completed.
Anything related to diet. Getting real answers takes way more work than can reasonably be done for anything more that the simplest questions.
GPS wouldn't work if relativity was wrong. Radio wouldn't work if our theory of electromagnetism was wrong. Satellites wouldn't stay in orbit if Newton was wrong. Modern medicine wouldn't work if our understanding of biology was wrong. And chemistry, physics, astronomy, mathematics and so forth all overlap, all require each other to some degree... and each of these interconnected areas of knowledge need to be correct, because we want to use it to build things or solve problems or make discoveries.
That's why I like science and engineering, it's a whole structure that, while not perfect or complete, has self-reinforcement and self-correction built in. And if it's right about something, the proof will be in the pudding. Otherwise, like you say, your airplane will fall out of the sky.
I believe you've got it backwards. The theory of relativity would be wrong if GPS did not work, the theory of electromagnetism would be wrong if radio did not work, etc. The only thing that working radio tells us is that certain mathematical model that we call theory of electromagnetism happens to agree with the real world (whatever that is) to a sufficient precision. For many purposes (like for example building radios), that is enough.
To a certain extent I agree, but I think you're missing a lot of nuance there. Boeing, for example, have built a lot of planes that fly as expected. The problem is the ones they built that don't: where bits fall off them or where their sensor systems don't work.
So do Boeing know a lot about aeronautical engineering, or are they just guessing? To what extent are they just pretending their planes are flying?
I was tangentially involved in a news story a few years ago. The reporter went to a small town, interviewed a few people, then wrote up an article. Only problem was they didn't actually interview anybody directly involved, it was a lot of hearsay from the small town rumor mill, which they reported as fact.
Nothing major about the story was changed, but I know some of the details were incorrect. It bugs me that these are now "facts", and places like Wikipedia confidently state these "facts" without anybody knowing the origin was just small town gossip.
> you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read.
This is interestingly close to what I think about claims of ChatGPT being ‘as good as an expert’ at, say, mathematics or medicine.
> Plumbing knowledge, for example, is constantly tested by whether the place floods after you’ve advanced your theory about what pipe connects to what. You need to get it right because it costs you something when you get it wrong.
Sure, for obvious failures where water is leaking in a spectacular fashion. But there's tons of shoddy non-obvious projects that work and look fine now. The problems come down the road, years later. Usually these problems come from either cutting corners or working under constraints.
You know those horror stories programmers or sys admins trade? How they saw something and couldn't believe their own eyes? Plumbers have those too, in buckets.
Maybe this whole paragraph about the plumbing is just a meta commentary on the "nobody knows what's going on". In that case, disregard the above.
An educated populace can better resist such issues. The solution is better journalism/reporting and better education.
Instead, the knee jerk reaction seems to be calling for further hollowing out of public education and less investment in traditional news media. I fear what that looks like after a few more decades.
No one trusts them anymore because they have all become partisan. The news nowdays doesn't seem to be about what happened. It's all takes. People disengage as a result. They watch it like sport.
> If you ever read an article on a subject with which you have a lot of first-hand experience, you’ll notice that they always get major things wrong – basic facts, dates, names of people and organizations, the stated intentions of involved parties, the reasons a thing is happening – things even a novice in the space would know better about.
A couple paragraphs in and I’m already like “Ah, here comes the Michael Crichton quote, the “papers’ full of ‘em” one.”
I’ve never read one of these that didn’t come off as unbearably smug. Like sure, discerning the truth is hard, duh. But the people who try their best to do it, even if they sometimes fail, are worth immeasurably more than the dead-souled people who decide “might as well sling bullshit since it’s impossible to be totally correct” (if that’s not what the article is saying out loud, it’s certainly what a lot of the commenters are saying)
Edit: Just to end on a positive note, I want to call out the one good piece of content in this genre, which takes Gell-Mann amnesia, flips it, inverts it, and then skewers Michio Kaku for trying to act like he knows about hurricanes: https://youtu.be/wBBnfu8N_J0?feature=shared
There’s a way around this, but it’s not fun or easy. It’s to listen to only the experts on that tiny sliver of a domain in which they are experts in. (And don’t listen to that expert when they talk about something that’s not their expertise .) This means listening to the expert on caves and not to the social media loving billionaire.
The tough thing about this approach is that the borders of each expert’s sliver of knowledge is not known to the reader, and maybe not even to the author themselves.
On top of that, individual experts still carry their own biases in their heads, and they lack any sort of editorial board to service the reader by separating knowledge from bias.
It’s easy for me to cast stones but I also have no answer. The best I’ve come to is to read broadly on topics you need to truly know and compare what you find in your sources. For less important topics just accept that you are likely off the mark and have much to learn.
During the early days of the pandemic, as advice to wear masks started to propagate into the population, and laypeople started to have to develop familiarity with concepts like ‘N95’, a community of helpful experts (often nurses and doctors, people with actual qualifications and real experience) piped up to tell the world that they had been trained in the proper use of PPE, and that there were very important donning and doffing procedures that needed to be followed (not touching the outside of the mask, eg), without which ordinary untrained mask users were going to be exposed to enormous risks. If you tried to use such masks without following these procedures you might as well just rub a dead bat on your face.
The thing is, though, that the PPE handling requirements which practitioners like nurses and doctors are trained in, for working in a clinical environment with patients who are highly infectious or highly vulnerable to infection, are not the same as the PPE handling requirements for walking around a supermarket during a public health emergency. Public health usage of masks was not supposed to solve the same problems as masks solve in surgery or in infectious disease care contexts.
Experts are vulnerable to having highly specific knowledge about how something works in a very narrow domain, but overestimating how well that knowledge applies to even quite closely related nearby domains.
This is an aside, but I don’t really think donning and doffing an N95 mask requires expert knowledge. It is easy to screw up if you don’t know to be careful, and the stakes are sort of high. But you can learn to do it by, like, reading the material that comes with the mask and watching a YouTube or something.
Rather, I thought the anti-mask advice came before it was known that masks helped. At the time this was the prudent advice: what they don’t want is people acting like the masks will fully protect them.
Yep totally and I agree expertise in one field means nothing in another. But I'm also old enough to have listened to a theoretical physicist on NASA's issues including the space shuttle challenger disaster. His thoughts have become regularly cited across many domains. He most certainly was not a rocket engineer.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
As I recall in that case he did a experiment to test his theory, (he chilled a sample of material the O-ring was made of and observered the result) and proved his hypothesis. The scientific method at work. You dont need to be a expert at everything when you have the resources to do adaquite research and experimentally test theories.
Some fields are such that they are hard to be expert in, but it’s trivially easy to verify expertise when observed. For example, playing tennis. It’s easy to identify a good tennis player even if you can’t play tennis at all. Another classic example is cooking. Even the most caveman-like philistine knows good food.
On the other hand, for some fields, verifying expertise (or ‘mastery’) is as hard as achieving it. Academic disciplines — particularly technical ones like science — are examples. In those cases, you probably have to rely on a trusted authority to verify legitimacy. Without that, you can’t distinguish the accomplished experts from the crackpot blowhards.
I don't think it's as easy as you make it sound. I probably couldn't differentiate an expert Shandong chef from a generically skilled chinese chef, even if I like their cooking. It's difficult as a non-expert to even know what the differences are, let alone be able to see (or taste) them.
> For example, playing tennis. It’s easy to identify a good tennis player even if you can’t play tennis at all.
I'm not so sure. Identifying good talent is difficult when it comes to sports. There's an entire industry of scouts that try to find decent players ahead of the others. More so, they are tasked with finding out why a particular players is good. It's anything but trivial.
One can be a master in certain art, yet can't explain what's going on.
Think cooking: Many chef "searing steaks" to "keep juice in". It don't keep juice in, but it taste good.
Think language: Most native speaker can form grammatically correct sentence, but they can't really explain how. Yet many linguists, knowing how some languages work, keep bullshitting about another language.
> Academic disciplines — particularly technical ones like science — are examples
Technical sciences are much easier than the social sciences. Social science is much more full of people who have no clue what they are doing than technical sciences, because technical sciences can be verified by experiments while social science is mostly about trust.
There's an entirely legitimate question here behind this quip.
I don't think there's a magical answer, but one approach I've found is to try to be a mini expert in a tiny, tiny slice of a bigger area (usually bridging over knowledge from some adjacent area I know). This means that I can then evaluate those who talk about this tiny area, and get a good baysian guess as to there broader expertise from there.
Typically someone who has spent their life working/researching/teaching in that sliver of a domain. It is also important to remember that experts start losing their expertise once they have retired or no longer actively working in that domain.
So you are looking for someone with many years of work experience in being an IC or lead or CEO or a researcher with a lab or PhD in that domain with lots of papers in highly respected/ranked conferences/journals. In domains you have no idea about, you might need to first read a book or general article which links back to such experts/sources and then it is easy to find the cluster of those experts in that domain.
My first test is to ask the expert to explain a complicated concept in their field, which I know a little bit about, in plain language that anyone can understand. Asking a few follow-up questions can usually separate the true experts from the fakes.
I believe you have to listen to the experts on the topic, consider their biases and motivation, contrast the varying viewpoints, compare the philosophical or scientific foundations of the arguments against your researched world view, and either reach a conclusion or leave the question unanswered. More the later.
This is the correct answer. I'd add _multiple_ experts, because even they can disagree depending on the topic, which is expected and healthy. And even then, realize that experts can be wrong, but they're much less likely to be wrong than <random skeptic>.
That is right. Listen to multiple experts and see what is the cluster/mean of an answer they are crystallizing around. And if they all have different answers, then it means that there is no clear answer for your question (yet).
so how do people vet information and maintain this skepticism without devolving into full conspiracy-esque "trust no one", "everyone has an agenda" type thinking?
> "If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports."
PS. It is not true that Linebarger was some furry rando.
One approach: apply skepticism to your own beliefs...learn to experience it like a game, so the natural (and culturally conditioned) human aversion to epistemology diminishes over time, or even reverses.
> without devolving into full conspiracy-esque "trust no one", "everyone has an agenda" type thinking?
Should this necessarily be avoided? Are you asserting that it is not substantially true?
If people only posted about topics they knew then their views wouldn't get corrected. You learn much better when you are corrected than when you just see the right information.
This is just a public web forum, not a professional symposium. It's here to provide entertainment and distraction to bored nerds with nothing better to do, expecting anything more from it is your mistake.
>For many, many, many, things, what's true is simply the number of people who believe it so.
Many many many people believe HN is more than a marketing campaign for a VC firm. That makes it true. The same as how many many people believe they are here to get educated and not entertained. That makes it true.
Welp. Guess I'm getting another hour added to my account limit after this, because I have to commit the sin of speaking candidly.
At one point, many many people believed diseases were borne by humors and miasmas, that didn't make it true. They believed the stars were etched onto crystal spheres, that didn't make it true. People believe the universe was created in a literal week, ten thousand years ago, but that doesn't make it true. People believe cancer can be healed by crystals, that doesn't make it true. More people believe the Earth is a flat disc now than did in the ancient world, that doesn't make it more true than it ever was. Is that last thing I said even true? I don't know, I just pulled it out of my ass and asserted it with confidence.
A prevailing belief that Hacker News is an educational resource does not make it true. One can be educated here, just as one can be educated anywhere. But that is not the purpose of this forum, nor is it a reasonable expectation to have. Hacker News is notorious for the gaping chasm between the proclaimed expertise of the claims made here, and actual knowledge, in any non-technical domain, and often even the technical. This tendency towards aggressive ignorance becomes obvious whenever actual experts in a field enter a thread and inevitably have to talk people down from their preconceptions, often getting harassment in exchange. No one is ever, ever as impressed with what Hacker News knows about anything, as Hacker News is with itself. This is such a well known facet of the culture here it got written up about in the New Yorker[0].
Hacker News is no better an educational resource than Reddit. Actually, it's worse than some technical subreddits, which require proof of domain knowledge and enforce a strict hierarchy between experts and lay posters - all it takes to join Hacker News is filling out a basic web form. No matter how much people want this place to be the apex of intellectual discussion, the last dying light of civilization in a culture overrun with normie scum, and the nexus of tech culture, or whatever, it is not, cannot and will never be. It is just a place where people hang out and shoot the shit. Anything more you might get from it is an anomaly, and just as often as not, a crapshoot.
You want to be educated? Take a class. Read a book. Get out and do the damn thing. Don't waste your time hanging out here expecting enlightenment. Carry water. Chop wood. Touch grass.
Yes, alright, but where else can you see comments such as yours? :-) It may not have been educational in a "learn a new skill" sense, but I found it inspiring as a reminder to stay skeptical.
Downvoting is often used as a mechanism to drive the said experts away, so the prevailing spirit is one of unfounded (celebrated) beliefs and forceful (punished) ignorance.
This article reminds me of a quote from George Washington, leader of the Rebel Army in American Revolutionary lore. He said, "Dayum, these pretzels are makin me thirsty!!!!"
That's what's so fun about deciding that you have a vanishing small slice of sorcery over the spectacle.
From a starting point of mereological nihilism, you can absolutely play to people's desire for ontological certainty. For many, many, many, things, what's true is simply the number of people who believe it so.
Kind of a bummer to think about.