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ricksunny10/11/20241 replyview on HN

This is beautifully articulated.

And reinforces my general below-the-line (layperson) fear about the state of physics today (as reinforced ofc by the likes of Sabine Hossenfelder & Eric Weinstein).


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btilly10/11/2024

Thank you for the compliment.

I've been working on how to formulate that idea clearly for a while. It is a problem that goes well beyond physics. For example I believe that the same cognitive error is behind the fact that experts do significantly worse than chance in actually predicting the world, and the more certain the expert sounds, the less likely they are to be right. See https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/d... for data demonstrating that fact.

Depressingly, this means that we consistently put public policy in the hands of people who are demonstrably incompetent.

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