Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect
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 exasp...
notes Hold Expertise in Esteem
Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science -- these are good things. (Applause.) These are qualities you want in people making policy. These are qualities you want to continue to cultivate in yourselves as citizens. (Applause.) That might seem obvious. (Laughter.) That's why we honor Bill Moyers or Dr. Burnell. We traditionally have valued those things. But if you were listening to today's political debate, you might wonder where this strain of anti-intellectualism ca... notes Using Lay Audiences to Force Explanation
In many fields—not just philosophy—there are controversies that seem never-ending and partly artifactual: people are talking past one another and not making the necessary effort to communicate effectively. Tempers flare, and disrespect and derision start creeping in. People on the sidelines take sides, even when they don’t fully understand the issues.
It can get ugly, and it can have a very straightforward cause. When experts talk to experts, whether they are in the same discipline or ...
1 Often when experts debate, they fall into the trap of assuming one another's expertise and fail to explain basic concepts, with the result that they beging talking past one anothers. An inventive solution to this is to have a group of non-experts be the audience and have the debaters address them instead.
No Such Thing as Professional Photographers
...there’s no such thing as Flickr Pro, because today, with cameras as pervasive as they are, there is no such thing really as professional photographers, when there’s everything is professional photographers. Certainly there is varying levels of skills, but we didn’t want to have a Flickr Pro anymore, we wanted everyone to have professional quality photos, space, and sharing.
1 The Yahoo CEO took a lot of heat for this comment, but there is a great deal of truth to it. With digital photography, photographs are so pervasive that professionals are now competing with a horde of amateurs.
Hedgehogs Do Worse the More Information They Have
Academic experts like the ones that Tetlock studied can suffer from the same problem. In fact, a little knowledge may be a dangerous thing in the hands of a hedgehog with a Ph.D. One of Tetlock’s more remarkable findings is that, while foxes tend to get better at forecasting with experience, the opposite is true of hedgehogs: their performance tends to worsen as they pick up additional credentials. Tetlock believes the more facts hedgehogs have at their command, the more opportunities they ... notesThey selectively take in the information to reaffirm their biases.
The Curse of Knowledge
Call the random variable being forecasted X. If X is a discrete event,
then it has the value zero or one. Forecasts of X depend on the
information set available to the forecaster. Assume that there are two
information sets Io and II, where Io is a subset of II. A forecaster
with information set I, knows everything that the forecaster with in-
formation set Io knows, and more.3 Denote the optimal forecast of X
given the information set I...Experts tend to assume others have the same knowledge they do and have difficulty taking the perspective of someone without their expertise. As a result, someone selling a car will sell it for less when they know about defects undetectable by buyers, investors will assume other investors are acting on the same knowledge they privately hold, and teachers will assume more knowledge from students then they actually have.
Scientists are Idiots Outside Their Field of Expertise
Scientists, especially when they leave the particular field in which they are specialized, are just as ordinary, pig-headed, and unreasonable as everybody else, and their unusually high intelligence only makes their prejudices all the more dangerous. notes"...and their unusually high intelligence only makes their prejudices all the more dangerous."
It Takes Numerous Experts to Explore a One-Mile Path
Of course, no one person has the time, knowledge, or skill to learn everything about a landscape, so in my walks 1 have relied upon the labors of generations of botanists, ornithologists, zoologists, geologists, ecologists, meteorologists, astronomers. cultural historians, and a host of other specialists who have studied with particular care some feature of the natural world. Whenever possible, I queried people I met along the way: the old people who grew up in the landscape, who knew it in i... notesChet Raymo lists all the individuals he needed to consult to fully understand the path he walks each day.
