I annotated their conversation. I think Tyler Cowen for the pointer.
An excerpt of my essay:
In short, you could say that we are in a crisis of social epistemology. The heuristic of “trust the credentialed expert” no longer works in the age of the Internet. But what does work?
Nice little essay.
In terms of who to trust…
1. “Seek facts rather than opinions.” Various people have proposed this–probably I picked it up in a John Train book on _The money masters_. Perhaps it was his profile of Warren Buffet. 30+ years ago. This must be a notion that goes back a few thousand years, but it’s still useful.
2. “Some fields don’t have experts.” It’s in _The black swan_. He even lists some fields. Check the index of _The Black Swan_, by Taleb.
3. At Quillette, Falkovich discusses Stanovich’s notion of “cognitive decoupling” and it’s salient here. Part of the problem with our current set of elites is they don’t seem to be very good at “cognitive decoupling.” To choose an extreme example, at Instapundit ™ they like to say that you should think of most journalists in the USA at the moment as “Democratic Party Operatives with bylines.”
It’s an overstated claim, and there’s no logical necessity for it to be true, but it’s a plausible suspicion at the moment.
It’s not a surprise that the old politicos from the city machines and the smoke filled rooms were always calculating the political implications of every idea and every utterance. We may have expected more from credentialed elites–perhaps we are expecting too much.
4. Conquest’s Laws might be useful here. “Everyone is conservative about the things they know best.” Don’t just ask people’s opinions–ask what they think about the things they know best–and watch their behavior. For example, you could learn a lot by noticing that the last U.S. president to send his children to the public schools of the District of Columbia was Jimmy Carter.
By the way, I appreciate your pointers to books/articles/ideas; an obvious tie-in with Kling’s emphasis on social learning. A related question, for me, is why does Kling post/publish some articles on Medium? I’m sure there is a logical explanation for doing so but I can’t fathom what it is, especially when considering his voiced frustration/opposition to Twitter.
Anecdotally, I enjoy hearing/reading Patrick Collision but I was frustrated while watching the YouTube video when he mentioned a book on scientific innovation. My Google search failed miserably at finding the book: I misheard the author’s name as “Braven” instead of “Braben”.
The “Braven” anecdote circles back to WordPress, Medium, Twitter, and social learning. Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” (no pun intended) partially applies but with the Internet, “the medium is also the network” when it comes to sharing and promoting information. A WordPress link to a Medium post annotating a YouTube videos that mentions a book is a whacky way to share info.
There are many weird and wonderful trade-offs in this world of ours and I don’t seem to be getting any better at recognizing and ranking them.
@RAD
I wasn’t sure if your comment was directed in part at me, but it seemed like it. If so, thanks for the compliment and it’s nice to be appreciated.
This is one of my favorite blogs–it’s a good learning tool and it’s hard for me to spend half an hour hear without learning something.
As a person who prefers reading to listening I found this very useful to introduce me to to their ideas with a value add of your commentary. If you and others condensed and commented on podcasts I think it would be a valuable contribution. Thanks, Drew
The Internet did not directly kill the ability to trust credentialed experts. Rather, it enabled non-professionals to communicate widely and, as a result, most people now know about the corruption in our institutions, especially Big Media itself, which has always been there.
I trust the ability of intelligent people in the marketplace eventually to sort things out, provided that mass communication doesn’t go back to being controlled by a cartel. To prevent this, the “deplatforming” movement needs to be defeated, and the consolidation of nearly all broadcasting into 6 or 8 huge multinationals needs to be stopped and reversed.