alt Hacker NewsThank 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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Some more reading on cognitive errors and expertise for you https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Spot-Solution-Right-Front/dp/00...
>Depressingly, this means that we consistently put public policy in the hands of people who are demonstrably incompetent.
You could depress yourself further by thinking that we get the government we deserve or you could re-assess your role in making good progress.
"A community is like a ship, everyone should be prepared to take the helm." - Henrik Ibsen
Given infinite outcomes, experts in a field without a theory of the world that can be used to calculate the future will always perform worse than chance.
Experts of engineering perform better than non experts. However the field of political behavior (or economy) is difficult. The only way to know what's going to happen is wait for it to happen.
Sometimes you know more or less what's going to happen but not the details or the exact outcome. That's enough to make plans.
Examples: at the beginning of 2024 we average persons knew that Putin would win the Russian elections no matter what. We average persons also knew that either Trump or Biden would win the American ones but we didn't know whom. We have to wait. Then surprise, it became either Trump or Harris.
Maybe there are people around the world or even the USA that wonder why Obama don't run for president instead of Harris. They are not experts of the rules of the competition.
So the question is, do the experts predictions are consistently worse than the predictions of any randomly picked person?
>> I've been working on how to formulate that idea clearly for a while. It is a problem that goes well beyond physics.
It's a really fundamental thing in psychology. The solution is something like the destruction of the ego, and many people who push hard enough to be a PhD tend toward larger ego to start with. Meditation and practicing martial arts can help. Apparently psychedelics can as well.
It's a real pain because if you try to tell someone their ego is preventing them from seeing things clearly... Well that's going to trigger the same problem. So yes, it's good to find ways to articulate the message so it can get through to those that suffer from it the most.