As you point out, it creates masters of a single rabbit hole, with all it's false dens, escapes etc. Back in the craft days this was common, people would apprentice and down a hole they went. Then came bulk parallel education, where people emerged with credentials of their rabbit holes mastered. (read, write, math....) and people were hired as such and then began the meat and potatoes of their new job. It is much the same with degreed education, but with a lot more granularity that increased as your degrees grew - postdocs etc, papers published etc.
So we now enter the area of the internet autodidact - how to prove what you know? What if you always hated partial differential equations = never ever studied. Same with statistics or the analysis of a segment of DNA by modern voltage drop capillary methods - hated all those.
In effect how to you answer a job ad with granular evidence of what you can do?
Will this end up creating a number of brilliant people with holes in their CV?
How to ID these holes so you can autodidact what you lack and may hate = a hirable person with a CV some HR algorithm allows to deal with the AI that acts as the human screener so you get an interview?
There will also be cheat AI's that are tasked with getting your BS CV past these initial screens in the hope that your high level BS AI can get you hired - sight unseen? There are huge numbers of people with well documented, fully faked CV's already beating down HR doors in response to their ads in hopes of getting some sort of job.... doubt me? ask a few high tech HR people which face this thicket of false AND litigious applicants on a daily basis.
The other side of the coin is the danger of gatekeeping, that those who benefit from them confuse social structures with the broader value of the ideas they communicate.
Smith questions whether these ideas have value outside of the social networks of "professional thinkers" but there are many examples of just that happening. Because some ideas seems valued or novel in one community doesn't mean it is seen as such in another, and at some level you could say that Smith's argument is akin to arguing logic has no meaning outside of it's popularity in a particular social group.
There's always this tension, between outsiders being narcissistically naive about things that are trivial to "professionals", and "professionals" being naive to their own blind spots and failings, convinced otherwise by their own narcissism.
I personally find these complaints about "cranks" kind of dubious. Either they have nothing to offer, in which case ignore them, or they do, in which case you should be able to articulate a compelling response.
I'm a card carrying expert in certain domains, and in my field, "cranks" sometimes make arguments that are exasperating but get at core assumptions of the field — and are often similar to arguments made by colleagues in adjoining fields. Being exasperated by cranks often reflects an underlying anxiety they might be right.
Theres also the fish gallop phenomenon, but unless you're dealing with something having real-world political or socioeconomic consequences, what does it matter? In that case it's not the cranks that are the problem but politics in general, and the people who listen to the cranks.
Problems caused by ideas are never the fault of the author, but rather, the listener. Where does that leave the status of social structures Smith advocates for?
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 14.7 ms ] threadSmith questions whether these ideas have value outside of the social networks of "professional thinkers" but there are many examples of just that happening. Because some ideas seems valued or novel in one community doesn't mean it is seen as such in another, and at some level you could say that Smith's argument is akin to arguing logic has no meaning outside of it's popularity in a particular social group.
There's always this tension, between outsiders being narcissistically naive about things that are trivial to "professionals", and "professionals" being naive to their own blind spots and failings, convinced otherwise by their own narcissism.
I personally find these complaints about "cranks" kind of dubious. Either they have nothing to offer, in which case ignore them, or they do, in which case you should be able to articulate a compelling response.
I'm a card carrying expert in certain domains, and in my field, "cranks" sometimes make arguments that are exasperating but get at core assumptions of the field — and are often similar to arguments made by colleagues in adjoining fields. Being exasperated by cranks often reflects an underlying anxiety they might be right.
Theres also the fish gallop phenomenon, but unless you're dealing with something having real-world political or socioeconomic consequences, what does it matter? In that case it's not the cranks that are the problem but politics in general, and the people who listen to the cranks.
Problems caused by ideas are never the fault of the author, but rather, the listener. Where does that leave the status of social structures Smith advocates for?