For sure. The older I get, the more I try to watch out for this effect.
It's a pain, but one of the nice parts is that it drives you to look for deeper principles. E.g., when my dad started coding, machine time was really expensive as was storage space, so everybody optimized for those things. Hello, Y2K! Now the opposite is true: developer time has gotten more expensive, and computation is cheap. In one sense, that invalidates a lot of old expertise. But on the other, optimization is still usually important, we're just optimizing for different things. A little reframing of habits and you can end up with a more flexible and subtle model.
Optimization never grows old, but it’s the more general form of optimization of which you speak, rather than hyper-specific instances of optimization which can overfit to specific eras.
I was thinking about this in the context of large transformer based language models like GPT-3. Based on my years of experience in the field, I keep thinking that this is a dead-end on the path to full AI but I have to force myself to keep an open mind and to not to fall into that trap.
Incidentally, Morgan Housel, the author of this essay is a very good financial writer - worth reading his other essays too.
Perhaps this was a cherry picked example on the part of the authors, but the network generating relevant novel images conditioned upon the text prompt “an illustration of a baby daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog” … made me take a (not entirely permanent) break from on ripping on GPT-3.
There was an amusing example of this yesterday with The Economist saying, `The sharp increase in inflation over the past year has blindsided many economists. Almost no one saw it coming`
"predicted 83 of the last 7 downturns" implies a false positive rate of at least 76 incorrect predictions for 7 correct ones.
Of course, if they made 83 downturn predictions but didn't correctly predict the 7 that actually occurred, thee false positive rate could also be worse than that.
The social media person at the Economist is bad at their jobs. The article goes into the nuances of the claim.
The specific claims are
Higher than expected inflation
> new data showed that America’s consumer price inflation rose to 5.4% in June, well above economists’ expectations. On July 14th it was revealed that British inflation rose to 2.5% in June, which was also higher than forecast.
The specific reason high inflation was not expected was because expected long term slump, which didn't happen
> Not long ago economists tended to the view that the covid-19 pandemic would lead to a prolonged slump in the rich world. That view has not worn well
> With unexpected growth has come an unexpected spurt of inflation
Well this is not true. There has been debate about an emerging inflation threat for many years now even long before the pandemic due to the rapid rate central banks are printing money to keep the economy floating since 2008. However in the financial market there are many people whose lives depend on constant growth creating a strong sentiment to either willfully mislead the market or just lie to themselves for comfort and self-preservation.
Lol everyone saw it coming, but policymakers needed everyone to think it wouldn't come, otherwise the public appetite for Covid measures would have been far less...
TIL Overton Window: "The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
A very useful concept.
I've done various forensic-oriented gigs for court cases. I was always given an titles like "Technical Expert" and sometimes really specific "Expert" terminology.
In one case I was brought in only to give a high level synopsis about how deleted files can often be carved out either in full or in part, may appear in multiple places at once, sometimes clearly showing edits, and also come with useful metadata stored within the directory entries both past and present.
They referred to me as the "Computer Filesystem Expert" which I thought was a bit strange, because I'm not what I'd consider an expert in file systems. Hell, I only barely know how journaling works without breaking down. I just know a lot about a very specific set of details that are useful in a forensic investigation.
So there is yet another use of the word "expert" that doesn't necessarily mean the same thing to everyone. It's not a useless title in this case, but it's really ambiguous to a person who understands more than the role requires.
buying stocks at all seemed like nothing but speculation in the 1920s because corporate disclosures were so opaque. By the 1970s that had changed, and you could begin to make rational, calculated long-term decisions that put the odds in your favor.
Thriving growth follows sunshine.
Meanwhile, Govs/Corps compulsively fight transparency. Their only greater priority is revenge on people who drag them into the light.
Tl;dr - Old experts cannot distinguish between historical/economic cycles vs. Paradigm shifts that break those cycles.
Nice theory, but adjust your scale over a thousand years and innovation has yet to usurp megacycles of boom/bust, war/peace or the rise/fall of "empires".
We may be better informed than we were in the 1700's, but we are no less partisan in our views, speculative in our ventures, nor vulnerable to geopolitical storms.
Using one of Housel's examples - high PE equity ratios are indicative of excess liquidity in the system chasing speculative yield; a subset of which excess liquidity is capital fleeing China for the West (or) A federal reserve & US Treasury committed to ensuring Boomer retirement assets are not wiped out in a market reversion to a historical mean. High PE equity ratios are not indicative of any underlying fundamentals that justify the majority of these prices.
Yes, Tesla _may_ be an exception _if_ Musk's innovation convergence strategy is monetized as its investors hope. But for every Tesla there is a Nikola, and for every Moderna a Theranos.
What do old experts (old farts like me) know that Housel may not? We've lived through about 8 recessions, three economic crisis, one bout of epic inflation, and we've watched change, ignorance and greed greatly disrupt or destroy corporate behemoths like Lucent, Enron, GM, GE, etc.
We know what is coming. We just can't tell you precisely when.
Housel's temporal sense appears to be stunted. And, yes, he does (as he stated) sound arrogant.
Tesla is not the exception, matter of fact it's the poster child of a world where the stock market going up becomes the goal pf both the elected and non-elected branches of the government and not an agnostic measurement tool to check how American public companies are faring.
Something I've noticed in the pandemic: there's a pretty big gap between what people remember "the experts" saying vs what, if you listened to one or two qualified professionals and kept them straight, actually said.
Individual experts—the good ones at least—seem to hold up pretty well even if they didn't see everything coming.
It's the widespread sampling of chyrons and faces that inevitably says everything all of the time and winds up looking incompetent.
Yes it seems like a combination of magnifying and muddling information.
Say, for example, a cancer researcher makes a statement like "Red wine contains compounds that might protect from some cancers" - not very interesting as news. So it gets magnified to "Red wine CURES cancer".
Next, another expert says "excessive use of alcohol can increases the risk of certain cancers". Of course the news converts this to "Alcohol causes cancer".
Finally, combine these two messages and people quite understanderbly conclude that cancer experts have no idea if alcohol causes or cures cancer.
There is that, but it also seems to be true that a lot of scientific studies are done badly. A lesson of the pandemic seems to be that when doing a meta-analysis you need to make sure to avoid the low-quality and fraudulent studies.
From the book of Proverbs (in the Bible): "The wise man gets a lot of advice" (paraphrased).
One chapter later: "The fool listens to most of it" (also paraphrased).
If you don't have the time to sort it all out, don't listen to all the viewpoints. Society, collectively, is insane - it believes so many contradictory things that could not all possibly be true. You can't listen to society or "they say" as a guide. You'll get nonsense.
But part of this is on the news, especially television and internet news. They need a hot take for this hour to draw eyeballs. It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to be new and different. But if you're trying to follow it to learn what to do to protect yourself in the pandemic, it's a hopelessly self-contradictory jumble. People wind up saying "They lied to us! They're still lying to us!" The problem is that "they" - the "they" that the media present to us - is too big a set.
Now, individual experts still can be mistaken, give bad advice, or even lie. But no expert is as confused as the union of all the experts.
Here is a set of people. On a given subject, the median position is likely to be at least reasonable. That's the "wisdom of the crowds".
Here is a set of experts. Within the area of their expertise, the median position is probably pretty close to right. The intersection of their views are almost certainly right (though it may be the empty set).
But what you can't do is take the union of the views of a set of people, and expect anything except a bizarre jumble of self-contradiction. And that's what the media gives us. (In fact, the media gives us the union, with extra emphasis added to the outliers, because those are "more interesting" and therefore attract more eyeballs.)
Wisdom of the crowds? Maybe. Wisdom of the media coverage of the crowds? No way.
This is why eyewitness testimony can be unreliable . People are sure someone said or believed something, or that there is a consensus about something, but this may not be true. Social media can make this worse, particularly by forming false consensuses about issues in which no such consensus may exist.
Some of this is a conflation of who the experts are, as well as hindsight bias on that question. If you look at say Fauci or Trevor Bedford's predictions, sure, they were pretty accurate (with some confusion in the middle of the pandemic when everything was confused). But if you take Rand Paul as your "expert" (also a medical doctor, but in a different specialty), you would've had a very different sense of what "the experts" were saying. And in the moment, you don't have the benefit of hindsight to judge the credibility of expert predictions, only their credentials.
"Experts" is synomim for politization of topics and create obedience.
Real experts have name and surname yet in my country they created groups of experts all the time for politicians to confirm their ideas.
"The experts" say we must raise taxes (in my area only personal income can be up to 54% of your earnings). I do know experts, without the quotes, who are totally against this tax abuse.
Also, for some reason, I did not see any expert yet for the taxing stuff or the pandemic medical teams that were supposed to exist and we did not get even names or surnames of them. Strange to say the least...
Now extend this to all areas possible that have political intereset and this is basically what "experts" are: excueses used by politicians of all colors to convict nce people of their stuff.
What I found interesting is that the period for reappearance of “failed ideas” is roughly the length of a career. Coincidence or due to any real effect I don’t know. I wrote a little about it here:
“Don’t be discouraged by the failure of technology or approaches of the past. If the problem is still important after all this time then it’s a problem worth solving. Don’t avoid unsuccessful solutions. Avoid insignificant problems. Success this time around could be unlocked by advances in any number of unrelated disciplines.”
I read a while back that scientific ideas usually take about 50 years to be accepted. Which means essentially that they never are accepted, the people who disagree with them just die and the next generation embrace them. Einstein pretty much hated quantum mechanics and ended up making a bunch of discoveries while making every effort to disprove it.
So if that’s how scientists do it - who should be the most amenable profession to new information and ideas, what chance do the rest of us have?
“A new scientific truth does not generally triumph by persuading its opponents and getting them to admit their errors, but rather by its opponents gradually dying out and giving way to a new generation that is raised on it. […] An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.”
I don't think this is accurate. Sometimes the facts are so plain that the new truth wins (or, at least, the old truth dies) quickly without much fuss.
Perhaps the earliest example of this was the destruction of the Ptolemaic view of the solar system by Galileo's observation of the phases of Venus. This was a "killer fact" that rapidly (after 1611) led to abandonment of that venerable theory, even by its supporters (although Clavius would die soon after). Sales of the standard texts on Ptolemaic astronomy, Sacrobosco's Sphere and Peuerbach's Theoricae novae planetarum went into immediate terminal decline.
A more recent example is the Big Bang's success over the Steady State model. The cosmic microwave background radiation was such an overwhelming piece of evidence in favor of the former that only cranks persisted with the latter (including unfortunately Hoyle, admittedly.)
I mean.. Einstein did prove himself wrong a bunch he just hated it. Its not like the work was flawed, or not performed. Its hard to find the sort of fault in that you seem to be implying.
I went through grad school and I saw how change comes about one funeral at a time. A big shot professor that has made their name with their pet theory/work will fiercely defend it against competing ideas, and people will defer to their expertise. It's not scientific, it's egotistic. They are a wall against progress that gets removed upon death. These professors can also create a dogma through their students who also all rely on the continued success of their theory for their employment. The incentives are misaligned against accepting new theories if it means someone will lose prestige.
We tend to romanticise it, but in the end it's just another job. It shouldn't, because selling you doing science is not the same as doing science, but on the other hand social expectations are that you must have a job, so what kind of exemption were we hoping for exactly? Once you realise it's ordinary people looking for whatever ordinary people look for anywhere else everything falls into place. Some science gets done regardless, we're talking about professionals here.
Academia can be likened more to a clergy or priesthood than a job. Although academics are expected to publish, it's not like the results or output are as tangible or quantifiable compared to most jobs.
Well, it's not that. Output is quantifiable and expected, try to survive doing your thing before tenure (at least and don't). Alas, the Republic of Letters is long gone. Kind of an ought-is problem.
I don't know, I've mentioned tenure though. I know that Peter Higgs has published IIRC 11? papers and that he's talked about his former status at his departament and not being productive enough for the modern academic system.
That was about 15 books, several I've heard of, but it's unclear about academic papers at least on that web page. He's clearly making an impact with his ideas.
Why does a scholarly work need to be labeled as an ‘academic paper’ when evaluating someone’s work? Did work from the 17th century not qualify because it wasn’t published in a journal?
But that's the system we built. Starting in college you're going to spend a decade and a half studying to be a world-class expert researching a topic of your own choosing.
And as soon as you become a professor you stop doing research and start begging for research funding so others can do what you did. And no one sees the problem with this so it continues.
That's more than a little ageist. Age has little to do with it. I've worked for--and been managed by--thick-headed, egotistical 20-somethings and stodgy older folks alike.
Youth who think they're forging new territory usually aren't, but there are plenty who think they are and have an arrogance about it that is insufferable.
> Youth who think they're forging new territory usually aren't
But that's part of the point of the article: The territory actively changes, so even if it's the same location in some sense, it's still new territory, ripe for exploration. Old people can see that, but it requires looking with fresh eyes, as opposed to only being willing to see what was there decades ago.
>>Old people can see that, but it requires looking with fresh eyes, as opposed to only being willing to see what was there decades ago.
The controversy arises from the structure of the sentence. It implies that 'looking with fresh eyes' is the rare thing, and the common thing is that older people are "only being willing to see what was there decades ago."
Sure, you technically acknowledged that it was possible, but the sentence structure guides the reader to conclude that your view is that old people only see the old stuff, thereby treating them as a monolithic unit, and thus ageist.
I've often had this sort of issue myself. I've found the only thing that helps is merciless self-editing, and keeping in mind two things.
First is a passing comment from a professional writer friend who was weighing how our choice of allocating more words or fewer gave different weight to each concept we were trying to get across in a short piece we were writing, saying something like "using that many words here gives it too much weight".
The second thing I've found often useful is to put the key concept and a key word at the end of the sentence and paragraph, where it is actually most punchy and emphatic. The beginning is second best, and the middle just buries it.
I notice that you sentence buried the 'fresh eyes' concept in the middle, and used a much longer ending phrase ending in 'decades ago', so compared to your intent stated here, the emphasis was kind of backwards.
Perhaps better would have been "Old people can see that, and although everyone's tendency to see just what they already know, they'll see the new opportunities just as well as anyone else when they make the effort to see with fresh eyes.".
At least in science there's the Planck's principle which is essentially "Science progresses one funeral at a time" - that adoption of major new mental models is driven mostly not by people changing their minds, but by them "dying out" and being replaced with new people who have adopted the new model since the beginning.
Not disputing the claims of you or msla, but how is this sentence ageist -
> Old people can see that, but it requires looking with fresh eyes, as opposed to only being willing to see what was there decades ago.
while this one is not -
> Youth who think they're forging new territory usually aren't, but there are plenty who think they are and have an arrogance about it that is insufferable.
Head to Capitol Hill and you'll see that the legislative side of that is much much younger. Though perhaps the age of the legislators skews the average.
This doesn't make any sense.
Aging is certainly a problem that needs to be solved, but the idea that you expressed here seems to be that younger people are better at their jobs - which is very wrong.
This line of thinking is akin to "If less of the postmen had diabetes, I would get more of my mail faster!"
Don't fall for these ageist logical inconsistencies
> Aging is certainly a problem that needs to be solved
by that logic, childhood is also a problem that needs to be solved.
I have to get metaphysical to argue against the mindset, but IMO the origin of seeing aging as a problem stems from seeing death as the opposite of life.
> but the idea that you expressed here seems to be that younger people are better at their jobs - which is very wrong
That is not the idea I took from the GP's comment about government workers being younger.
Younger people have a different perspective to older people. That might lead to a better direction.
If you think about progress/improvement as a vector, there's speed and direction. Young and old people might have the same speed but different directions, and younger people might have a direction which is more beneficial long term.
It's less that I think they'd be individually better at their jobs and more that I wonder (without evidence fwiw) if a slightly younger organization would have more diversity of thought because they're coming to things with objectively fresher eyes.
"If my chess team of 45-year-olds were 10 years younger, I would win more games." Is this also an ageist logical inconsistency? At some point claims like this are testable.
On a separate note, of course 20-year-olds are better at their jobs than 100-year-olds. So the phenomenon of younger people being better at their jobs is true at an extreme. You can argue that it doesn't extend much further than this extreme, but saying it doesn't exist at all is silly.
It would go perfect if they were not bothering and spoiling citizens and making dependents. We would be far more useful ourselves and less restricted to do real contributions to the society.
"If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
It is unfortunate -- sometimes very smart people try good ideas, but the world isn't quite ready yet so they fail, move on to something different, and write off the old idea.
That generational thing sounds a lot like IT's eternal flip-flop between thick clients and thin clients. (I'm fully expecting "web browsers are too thick, we need a thin alternative" to appear any day now). On the back-end, serverless is time-sharing.
Your attempt-fail-stigmatise curve has a lot in common with the Gartner hype cycle.
This article offers nothing of value IMO... because what it's saying is basically that experts will, at some point, fail to see that circumstances have changed and advice that was good in their own "time" is no longer good... however, that's an obvious remark: as another commenter pointed out, people almost always tend to think "this time it will be different" and choose to ignore the experts... I would say more useful advice would be that you do that at your own peril: most of the time, nearly always, the experts will be right... the occasions where things really will be different are rare and far between. Eventually, a lucky kid will do well by ignoring the experts, but only after thousands before them failed doing the same thing.
You missed about half the article. There was this part (along with lots of examples), "Some expertise is timeless. A few behaviors always repeat. They’re often the most important things to pay attention to."
I didn't miss it, just ignored it because no one, not even the experts, konw which part of their expertise is "timeless" and which isn't (otherwise the problem wouldn't exist in the first place).
I'm not sure it's so much about timelesss expertise (Although that exists as well). Rather, the advice is probably something along the lines that when experts tell you that some form of the thing you're doing has been tried half-a-dozen times in the past and has failed--it probably will fail this time too. However, sometimes the difference from what was done in the past is sufficient to make it work this time. Or the surrounding technology ecosystem is qualitatively different. So it's worth considering what it is in today's environment that would invalidate the expert opinion.
And what if the opportunity cost lost retrying something that didn’t work over and over? Maybe it will eventually succeed but what else could have happened with the same effort?
This article strikes me as the height of overconfidence tbh. The experts are frequently wrong but they're also usually right, and just blindly ignoring them usually leads to easily avoidable mistakes. You weigh the opinions of experts and then discount them when they're wrong, but only when you're really sure
How come they are very often two experts with opposite opinion? Whoever is right can only be proven by time and mostly by realizing the wrong choice was made.
If half the experts say to buy stocks and the other half say to sell, who is right? Aat some point, you have to decide. I have observed this a lot with finance. Listening to the wrong experts would have meant missing out on the biggest bull market ever (2009) or selling during the lows of the 2020 covid crash.
Finance is a discipline where expertise is really, really difficult to judge. You mention two extraordinary events though. Perhaps even in finance, on normal circumstances, i.e. 99.9% of the time, you would be wise to follow the experts, but on extremely rare events like a pandemic or the recovery period following a once-in-a-decade crash, no one, not even the experts, can predict what's going to happen (let alone you or me)?!
> So it will always be the case that those with the most experience – and the good, smart, accurate wisdom that comes from it – will be the least willing to adapt their views as the world evolves.
This is where I stopped reading, although I will finish the article.
He’s writing about the stereotype.
Humility often comes with this experience and wisdom. Some people are capable of seeing that everything is changing, all the time, regardless of their personal experience.
That recognition frees you to embrace new, different, the things that used to be unthinkable.
This quote made me feel better: "Some of the biggest businesses of the last 10 years are all in industries that were the starkest examples of stupidity 20 years ago."
I'm still a little bitter from VC experiences 20 years ago.
In 1998 my friends and I built a browser-based (Java applet) collaborative word processor and spreadsheet called Office Wherever (o-w.com). We shopped it to a dozen VCs and all went ROFLMAOWTFBBQ. They all said the same - no company would want to put their files on the (scary) Internet (the term "cloud" was still years away).
In 2001 my friend and I had built a full music & movie/tv streaming service with a full-screen interface that looks just like the modern ones, built demo hardware, had access to all the rights etc. Everyone we pitched it to went ROFLMAOWTFBBQ. They said people will NEVER get rid of their DVDs! They like having things on their shelves to show off. What a stupid idea! You need to be like Netflix and rent DVDs to people! You stupid! STUPID STUPID STUPID!
I wonder what folks are pitching today to VCs who are rolling on the floor laughing when they see the "stupid" demo?
I feel you. When I was working in IBM research, I developed a web-based tool eerily close to Jupyter in 2007 but was simply unable to get traction within the company and abandoned the work by the end of the year. I still regret not pushing forward with it to this day.
There was a time that Google had good sucess by launching new products that Yahoo had launched 5 years earlier and cancelled due to lack of interest.
Nobody wants to be a patent troll, but being too early and filing patents can set you up for late revenue. Even if it's just watching for patent trolls and licensing your patents to the victims to double troll.
Experiences like this seem not to have made Musk bitter, but just even more determined.[1]
Comes down to the old “Would you rather be famous for a great thing you never did, or have done something great without anybody else realizing it?”
You experienced the same things as Elon Musk. When he pitched Zip2, the execs from Yellow Pages laughed at him, shoved the yellow pages book over the table and said, “So you think you’re gonna replace THIS?”.
What you're saying is that you have seen things and done things like Elon Musk. You didn't get the wealth and the recognition. But that you have these things "in you" - how many people can say that about themselves? You not only had really visionary ideas that were proven right within a decade. But you also built a Google Docs and a Netflix before Google and Netflix did.
You're one of the Semmelweises or Lickliders of history. They didn't get rich, and most people don't know about them. But they are the ones who actually drive our world forwards. They are the ones who go "Zero to One". The others are just resellers, even if they end up getting all the credit.
[1] I mean, the guy was bullied at school and still did not, as one might expect, end up being driven in life by “paying them back”, or by retreating from humanity. This trait of “taking a lot of crap without becoming dirty himself” is an underestimated quality that he has.
At first I was a little wary of this, because it had the sort of smooth, business-school-y tone that makes you worry someone’s trying to sell you something.
But I after reading I thought this was genuinely insightful. Particularly politically.
I think it helps give me some perspective to know that different smart, well-intentioned people have believed wholeheartedly in entirely contradictory positions in their lifetimes.
I enjoyed this so much. The stories about Ford were terrific.
A lot of "wisdom" is contextual and gets mistaken for universal. We learn "X works" and, having been burned by everything else we tried, jealously guard the value of X as very special and precious.
Scars obtained in the process of obtaining expertise are likely an underrecognized factor in experts becoming ossified in their opinions. They learned that everything else bites and this doesn't. They don't want to get bit again.
Then conditions change and now nothing is guaranteed to work like it did before. It likely seems unfair to find their hard won wisdom is now irrelevant baggage.
Experts have done a lot of exploration and gained much experience, but just having abilities is nothing by itself. You need to exploit your abilities as well, employ them for good gain, and that takes time from exploration. Maybe you don't want to explore anymore because it's so good where you are at. This happened to Microsoft as well.
266 comments
[ 6.6 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadThe spectrum of opinions towards emerging technologies is so starkly colored by the eras during which practitioners did their primary work.
It reminds me of the Heinlein quote from “A Door into Summer”, “When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before.”
It's a pain, but one of the nice parts is that it drives you to look for deeper principles. E.g., when my dad started coding, machine time was really expensive as was storage space, so everybody optimized for those things. Hello, Y2K! Now the opposite is true: developer time has gotten more expensive, and computation is cheap. In one sense, that invalidates a lot of old expertise. But on the other, optimization is still usually important, we're just optimizing for different things. A little reframing of habits and you can end up with a more flexible and subtle model.
Optimization never grows old, but it’s the more general form of optimization of which you speak, rather than hyper-specific instances of optimization which can overfit to specific eras.
Incidentally, Morgan Housel, the author of this essay is a very good financial writer - worth reading his other essays too.
https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/
https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/1461651190144503808
"predicted 83 of the last 7 downturns" implies a false positive rate of at least 76 incorrect predictions for 7 correct ones.
Of course, if they made 83 downturn predictions but didn't correctly predict the 7 that actually occurred, thee false positive rate could also be worse than that.
> The stock market has predicted nine of the past five recessions—a joke from master Keynesian of decades ago Paul Samuelson.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/briandomitrovic/2018/11/22/the-...
The specific claims are
Higher than expected inflation
> new data showed that America’s consumer price inflation rose to 5.4% in June, well above economists’ expectations. On July 14th it was revealed that British inflation rose to 2.5% in June, which was also higher than forecast.
The specific reason high inflation was not expected was because expected long term slump, which didn't happen
> Not long ago economists tended to the view that the covid-19 pandemic would lead to a prolonged slump in the rich world. That view has not worn well
> With unexpected growth has come an unexpected spurt of inflation
– Tara Ploughman
AKA: wisdom. Seek, cherish, and protect that. Wisdom is functional.
'Expertise' is often knowledge if the current/historical state of affairs. When a dam breaks:
> It usually means other parts of the system have evolved in a way that allows what was once impossible to now become practical.
The state of the hardware, the software, and the peopleware at any moment in time is an Overton Window.
It intersects with Chomsky's ideas about manufacturing consent quite nicely too
In one case I was brought in only to give a high level synopsis about how deleted files can often be carved out either in full or in part, may appear in multiple places at once, sometimes clearly showing edits, and also come with useful metadata stored within the directory entries both past and present.
They referred to me as the "Computer Filesystem Expert" which I thought was a bit strange, because I'm not what I'd consider an expert in file systems. Hell, I only barely know how journaling works without breaking down. I just know a lot about a very specific set of details that are useful in a forensic investigation.
So there is yet another use of the word "expert" that doesn't necessarily mean the same thing to everyone. It's not a useless title in this case, but it's really ambiguous to a person who understands more than the role requires.
Thriving growth follows sunshine.
Meanwhile, Govs/Corps compulsively fight transparency. Their only greater priority is revenge on people who drag them into the light.
Nice theory, but adjust your scale over a thousand years and innovation has yet to usurp megacycles of boom/bust, war/peace or the rise/fall of "empires".
We may be better informed than we were in the 1700's, but we are no less partisan in our views, speculative in our ventures, nor vulnerable to geopolitical storms.
Using one of Housel's examples - high PE equity ratios are indicative of excess liquidity in the system chasing speculative yield; a subset of which excess liquidity is capital fleeing China for the West (or) A federal reserve & US Treasury committed to ensuring Boomer retirement assets are not wiped out in a market reversion to a historical mean. High PE equity ratios are not indicative of any underlying fundamentals that justify the majority of these prices.
Yes, Tesla _may_ be an exception _if_ Musk's innovation convergence strategy is monetized as its investors hope. But for every Tesla there is a Nikola, and for every Moderna a Theranos.
What do old experts (old farts like me) know that Housel may not? We've lived through about 8 recessions, three economic crisis, one bout of epic inflation, and we've watched change, ignorance and greed greatly disrupt or destroy corporate behemoths like Lucent, Enron, GM, GE, etc.
We know what is coming. We just can't tell you precisely when.
Housel's temporal sense appears to be stunted. And, yes, he does (as he stated) sound arrogant.
Tesla is not the exception, matter of fact it's the poster child of a world where the stock market going up becomes the goal pf both the elected and non-elected branches of the government and not an agnostic measurement tool to check how American public companies are faring.
Individual experts—the good ones at least—seem to hold up pretty well even if they didn't see everything coming.
It's the widespread sampling of chyrons and faces that inevitably says everything all of the time and winds up looking incompetent.
Say, for example, a cancer researcher makes a statement like "Red wine contains compounds that might protect from some cancers" - not very interesting as news. So it gets magnified to "Red wine CURES cancer".
Next, another expert says "excessive use of alcohol can increases the risk of certain cancers". Of course the news converts this to "Alcohol causes cancer".
Finally, combine these two messages and people quite understanderbly conclude that cancer experts have no idea if alcohol causes or cures cancer.
One chapter later: "The fool listens to most of it" (also paraphrased).
If you don't have the time to sort it all out, don't listen to all the viewpoints. Society, collectively, is insane - it believes so many contradictory things that could not all possibly be true. You can't listen to society or "they say" as a guide. You'll get nonsense.
But part of this is on the news, especially television and internet news. They need a hot take for this hour to draw eyeballs. It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to be new and different. But if you're trying to follow it to learn what to do to protect yourself in the pandemic, it's a hopelessly self-contradictory jumble. People wind up saying "They lied to us! They're still lying to us!" The problem is that "they" - the "they" that the media present to us - is too big a set.
Now, individual experts still can be mistaken, give bad advice, or even lie. But no expert is as confused as the union of all the experts.
Here is a set of experts. Within the area of their expertise, the median position is probably pretty close to right. The intersection of their views are almost certainly right (though it may be the empty set).
But what you can't do is take the union of the views of a set of people, and expect anything except a bizarre jumble of self-contradiction. And that's what the media gives us. (In fact, the media gives us the union, with extra emphasis added to the outliers, because those are "more interesting" and therefore attract more eyeballs.)
Wisdom of the crowds? Maybe. Wisdom of the media coverage of the crowds? No way.
Real experts have name and surname yet in my country they created groups of experts all the time for politicians to confirm their ideas.
"The experts" say we must raise taxes (in my area only personal income can be up to 54% of your earnings). I do know experts, without the quotes, who are totally against this tax abuse.
Also, for some reason, I did not see any expert yet for the taxing stuff or the pandemic medical teams that were supposed to exist and we did not get even names or surnames of them. Strange to say the least...
Now extend this to all areas possible that have political intereset and this is basically what "experts" are: excueses used by politicians of all colors to convict nce people of their stuff.
“Don’t be discouraged by the failure of technology or approaches of the past. If the problem is still important after all this time then it’s a problem worth solving. Don’t avoid unsuccessful solutions. Avoid insignificant problems. Success this time around could be unlocked by advances in any number of unrelated disciplines.”
https://blog.eutopian.io/the-next-big-thing-go-back-to-the-f...
So if that’s how scientists do it - who should be the most amenable profession to new information and ideas, what chance do the rest of us have?
— Max Planck, 1948
Perhaps the earliest example of this was the destruction of the Ptolemaic view of the solar system by Galileo's observation of the phases of Venus. This was a "killer fact" that rapidly (after 1611) led to abandonment of that venerable theory, even by its supporters (although Clavius would die soon after). Sales of the standard texts on Ptolemaic astronomy, Sacrobosco's Sphere and Peuerbach's Theoricae novae planetarum went into immediate terminal decline.
A more recent example is the Big Bang's success over the Steady State model. The cosmic microwave background radiation was such an overwhelming piece of evidence in favor of the former that only cranks persisted with the latter (including unfortunately Hoyle, admittedly.)
This is to some degree the point made in Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
Just pointing out that he fought hard against a new idea (that did turn out to be right) - with, as you say some really helpful consequences!
Maybe he will still turn out to be right in the end though and some grand unification theory is eventually found that is beautiful and simple!
This article resonated strongly with me.
And as soon as you become a professor you stop doing research and start begging for research funding so others can do what you did. And no one sees the problem with this so it continues.
Youth who think they're forging new territory usually aren't, but there are plenty who think they are and have an arrogance about it that is insufferable.
But that's part of the point of the article: The territory actively changes, so even if it's the same location in some sense, it's still new territory, ripe for exploration. Old people can see that, but it requires looking with fresh eyes, as opposed to only being willing to see what was there decades ago.
The controversy arises from the structure of the sentence. It implies that 'looking with fresh eyes' is the rare thing, and the common thing is that older people are "only being willing to see what was there decades ago."
Sure, you technically acknowledged that it was possible, but the sentence structure guides the reader to conclude that your view is that old people only see the old stuff, thereby treating them as a monolithic unit, and thus ageist.
I've often had this sort of issue myself. I've found the only thing that helps is merciless self-editing, and keeping in mind two things.
First is a passing comment from a professional writer friend who was weighing how our choice of allocating more words or fewer gave different weight to each concept we were trying to get across in a short piece we were writing, saying something like "using that many words here gives it too much weight".
The second thing I've found often useful is to put the key concept and a key word at the end of the sentence and paragraph, where it is actually most punchy and emphatic. The beginning is second best, and the middle just buries it.
I notice that you sentence buried the 'fresh eyes' concept in the middle, and used a much longer ending phrase ending in 'decades ago', so compared to your intent stated here, the emphasis was kind of backwards.
Perhaps better would have been "Old people can see that, and although everyone's tendency to see just what they already know, they'll see the new opportunities just as well as anyone else when they make the effort to see with fresh eyes.".
I hope this helps.
> Old people can see that, but it requires looking with fresh eyes, as opposed to only being willing to see what was there decades ago.
while this one is not -
> Youth who think they're forging new territory usually aren't, but there are plenty who think they are and have an arrogance about it that is insufferable.
This line of thinking is akin to "If less of the postmen had diabetes, I would get more of my mail faster!" Don't fall for these ageist logical inconsistencies
by that logic, childhood is also a problem that needs to be solved. I have to get metaphysical to argue against the mindset, but IMO the origin of seeing aging as a problem stems from seeing death as the opposite of life.
That is not the idea I took from the GP's comment about government workers being younger.
Younger people have a different perspective to older people. That might lead to a better direction.
If you think about progress/improvement as a vector, there's speed and direction. Young and old people might have the same speed but different directions, and younger people might have a direction which is more beneficial long term.
On a separate note, of course 20-year-olds are better at their jobs than 100-year-olds. So the phenomenon of younger people being better at their jobs is true at an extreme. You can argue that it doesn't extend much further than this extreme, but saying it doesn't exist at all is silly.
"If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
It is unfortunate -- sometimes very smart people try good ideas, but the world isn't quite ready yet so they fail, move on to something different, and write off the old idea.
Your attempt-fail-stigmatise curve has a lot in common with the Gartner hype cycle.
isn't this the thesis of mighty.app?
This is where I stopped reading, although I will finish the article.
He’s writing about the stereotype.
Humility often comes with this experience and wisdom. Some people are capable of seeing that everything is changing, all the time, regardless of their personal experience.
That recognition frees you to embrace new, different, the things that used to be unthinkable.
I'm still a little bitter from VC experiences 20 years ago.
In 1998 my friends and I built a browser-based (Java applet) collaborative word processor and spreadsheet called Office Wherever (o-w.com). We shopped it to a dozen VCs and all went ROFLMAOWTFBBQ. They all said the same - no company would want to put their files on the (scary) Internet (the term "cloud" was still years away).
In 2001 my friend and I had built a full music & movie/tv streaming service with a full-screen interface that looks just like the modern ones, built demo hardware, had access to all the rights etc. Everyone we pitched it to went ROFLMAOWTFBBQ. They said people will NEVER get rid of their DVDs! They like having things on their shelves to show off. What a stupid idea! You need to be like Netflix and rent DVDs to people! You stupid! STUPID STUPID STUPID!
I wonder what folks are pitching today to VCs who are rolling on the floor laughing when they see the "stupid" demo?
Nobody wants to be a patent troll, but being too early and filing patents can set you up for late revenue. Even if it's just watching for patent trolls and licensing your patents to the victims to double troll.
Comes down to the old “Would you rather be famous for a great thing you never did, or have done something great without anybody else realizing it?”
You experienced the same things as Elon Musk. When he pitched Zip2, the execs from Yellow Pages laughed at him, shoved the yellow pages book over the table and said, “So you think you’re gonna replace THIS?”.
What you're saying is that you have seen things and done things like Elon Musk. You didn't get the wealth and the recognition. But that you have these things "in you" - how many people can say that about themselves? You not only had really visionary ideas that were proven right within a decade. But you also built a Google Docs and a Netflix before Google and Netflix did.
You're one of the Semmelweises or Lickliders of history. They didn't get rich, and most people don't know about them. But they are the ones who actually drive our world forwards. They are the ones who go "Zero to One". The others are just resellers, even if they end up getting all the credit.
[1] I mean, the guy was bullied at school and still did not, as one might expect, end up being driven in life by “paying them back”, or by retreating from humanity. This trait of “taking a lot of crap without becoming dirty himself” is an underestimated quality that he has.
They all need to be executed. Every last one of them.
But I after reading I thought this was genuinely insightful. Particularly politically.
I think it helps give me some perspective to know that different smart, well-intentioned people have believed wholeheartedly in entirely contradictory positions in their lifetimes.
A lot of "wisdom" is contextual and gets mistaken for universal. We learn "X works" and, having been burned by everything else we tried, jealously guard the value of X as very special and precious.
Scars obtained in the process of obtaining expertise are likely an underrecognized factor in experts becoming ossified in their opinions. They learned that everything else bites and this doesn't. They don't want to get bit again.
Then conditions change and now nothing is guaranteed to work like it did before. It likely seems unfair to find their hard won wisdom is now irrelevant baggage.
Doesn't she know the facts and science that masking spreads germs?
Is Kamala Harris an expert in getting rugburns on her knees?