michael_nielsen

If the answer is just "You get experts whose domain expertise is more appropriate [than Einstein etc] for the particular problem under consideration" then the article becomes true but obvious and uninteresting.

The likelihood that you will get someone who understands the math _and_ the institutional politics _and_ the local specificities of Pennsylvania politics is obviously very low. Genius travels - but nearly always within a specific ambit and with a specific bag of tricks.

So I think you need to integrate very different kinds of expertise if you want to answer these questions. Though I can’t remember how/if you talk about these specific kinds of cognitive crossover in Reinventing Science …

I gave a few very examples - there are some particularly nice ones in Kasparov versus the World where amateurs contributed important ideas that the experts didn't think of.

Yes, I like that example a lot. I do disagree with the sharp division you draw between science and politics in that book (science seems more political to me, and politics at least a little more concerned with search for knowledge than you say, as best as I recall it).

I was trying to make a very specific point about the conditions under which knowledge can build. I'd be a bit more measured today, particularly understanding some of the problems around replication - many fields of science seem to barely deserve the term.

But I should also note that my suggestion for any academic who waxes too lyrical about democracy that wherever they use terms like “deliberative democratic setting” they should paste in “departmental committee meeting” instead, and see if argument still seems compelling to them

One amusing variant of this is to talk to natural scientists about politics. Most - not all, but most - rely on standards of argument that they'd give a student an F for in their own field. (I'm guilty.) Talk to a polisci person on the other hand, & you get a real argument...