My sense of 'being able to navigate the world accurately' has been less 'learning facts about the world', like I predicted, and more 'learning how to accurately gauge the trustworthiness of experts.'
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Turns out, experts are wrong, a lot! But how do you know when they're wrong, if you're not an expert? If you learn a fact that seems to contradict an expert, how do you know if this is important or if you're simply too ignorant to know how that fact is irrelevant?
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It's hard to figure this out, but lately I pay attention to a few things
1. If an expert is talking about something outside their field, they're much more likely to be wrong and also less likely to be noticed, because they have confidence and authority that reassures everyone.
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2. If an expert is subject to incentives: anything ideological, in any direction, is a big pressure to not think accurately - so for example "professor of feminist studies at UC Berkeley" or "Famous Qanon ex-CIA youtuber"? Be more suspicious.
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3. If what they say simply don't make sense to you. This is a bit vague, because a lot of experts are right even if you don't understand them. But if you are trying, really hard, to genuinely understand, if you're not ideologically opposed, but something still seems off? Be sus.
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4. If the requirements to become an expert in their field require heavily on memorization, instead of paradigm-challenging problem solving. Lots of credentials are just meant to show you know the existing information well, and don't mean you're good at accurate predictions.
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Expertise is very often a fuzzy veneer of authority that we bestow on a few select people for being able to pass the right tests. And being able to pass tests is good, but we still need to be informed and discerning in how we choose to give out our trust.
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Replying to
halfway to Talebville: it doesn’t really matter how trustworthy experts are, what really matters is how protected you are from the consequences of their inevitable failure
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The phenomenon of American expats in developing world countries big-fishing the locals is pretty common; a partner of mine who lived overseas for a decade said "foreigners don't pick up on the signals of mediocrity" that these folks tend to exude to other Americans.
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Consensus among experts is also important. Multiple lines of evidence showing the same conclusion. Some experts are just outliers of the consensus and sometimes shift the paradigm and sometimes don’t.
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