Hmmmm. I am wondering about the information transmission/propagation process and how that might effect outcomes.
The “experts” are know to be connected with some subject area. When people (particularly media and government) the “experts” are brought in. LW has had at least one thread on this situation and what some of the problems might be.
The “armchair” people are probably two forms—either they are some form of known “celebrity” type of smart person or they are unknowns to the world generally. In either case the utterances from these people run through a different filter before their claims become part of the general information about X.
In this particular context—a pandemic, we don’t have too many real experts in the sense of “I’ve done this before and I have see this playing out”. Yes, we’ve seen outbreak and understand the transmission processes and models pretty well. However, some of this seems to be different than SARS, MERS and similar more contained or localized events.
As someone mentioned, we can find a bunch or pretty silly analysis or recommendation from the armchair side (even that it’s a hoax, just like a cold/flu or only a problem for the really old and already sick not the healthy). We when we make the claim about how the armchair crowd has done much better than the experts I think we gloss over how those good armchair positions came into the general information set. They were the cream of the crop and filters via a number of social filtering mechanisms.
We should not compare the best armchair position against some average expert position (where the experts may in fact not really be experts).
This might however suggest the selection mechanism used by both media and government in situations where we are dealing with something somewhat new may have some weaknesses that we want to review.
You’re right about the selection process being a major factor. Part of the reason I read LessWrong is that the selection mechanism for posts here seems really, really good—good enough that I often sanity check actual doctors/experts by cross referencing against LW and seeing what matches up.
Hmmmm. I am wondering about the information transmission/propagation process and how that might effect outcomes.
The “experts” are know to be connected with some subject area. When people (particularly media and government) the “experts” are brought in. LW has had at least one thread on this situation and what some of the problems might be.
The “armchair” people are probably two forms—either they are some form of known “celebrity” type of smart person or they are unknowns to the world generally. In either case the utterances from these people run through a different filter before their claims become part of the general information about X.
In this particular context—a pandemic, we don’t have too many real experts in the sense of “I’ve done this before and I have see this playing out”. Yes, we’ve seen outbreak and understand the transmission processes and models pretty well. However, some of this seems to be different than SARS, MERS and similar more contained or localized events.
As someone mentioned, we can find a bunch or pretty silly analysis or recommendation from the armchair side (even that it’s a hoax, just like a cold/flu or only a problem for the really old and already sick not the healthy). We when we make the claim about how the armchair crowd has done much better than the experts I think we gloss over how those good armchair positions came into the general information set. They were the cream of the crop and filters via a number of social filtering mechanisms.
We should not compare the best armchair position against some average expert position (where the experts may in fact not really be experts).
This might however suggest the selection mechanism used by both media and government in situations where we are dealing with something somewhat new may have some weaknesses that we want to review.
You’re right about the selection process being a major factor. Part of the reason I read LessWrong is that the selection mechanism for posts here seems really, really good—good enough that I often sanity check actual doctors/experts by cross referencing against LW and seeing what matches up.