Conversation

Before Twitter and Google we used to become overnight experts on big news topics by rushing to the library and reading encyclopedias.
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Dunno why people are so down on sudden expertise. It’s better than persistent ignorance. Twitter sense-making crash courses have in fact made me more knowledgeable on many hot-take topics than on topics I’ve taken college classes in.
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People really have poor intuitions on the radical effects of information abundance, real-time updating, collective sensemaking, and Darwinian filtering of bs. College is good for topics where deep reasoning is needed. For everything else, use the hive mind.
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Never forget, fast-OODA people with Twitter degrees making up mental models out of shitposts routinely did better than people listening to degreed experts through the pandemic. High variance outcomes of course but not random.
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I’m already seeing more cogent analysis on Twitter by randos than generals and academic Ukraine experts on CNN. It’s less consistent, but if you filter well, reliably sharper.
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Replying to
Why is “filtering well” easier than judging the subject directly? Or in other words, how do you accurately judge an expert without having your own expertise on their area? (Honest question. Some people clearly get this wrong, after all.)
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Yeah, I think that’s a lot of it. It’s a reality but it’s still a puzzle to me. Fwiw is a whole podcast on common rhetorical tropes in “gurus” (phony experts, sort of). The success of these types shows many are bad at second-order judgment especially of unusual views