I found myself in a situation like: “if this is common knowledge within econ, writing an explanation would signal I’m not part of econ and hence my econ opinions are low status”, but decided to go ahead anyway.
It’s good you found it helpful. I’m wondering if equilibria like the above is a mechanism preventing important stuff from being distilled.
writing an explanation would signal I’m not part of econ and hence my econ opinions are low status
I think this is the strongest possible argument for writing something.
A. I don’t always know the true status of my opinions on a subject; there’s no faster way to get such information than to voice the opinion and collect corrections. I routinely used this trick in school on professors, and it works on most any other kind of expert: if you can’t get their attention, make a slightly wrong assertion on purpose, and they will hurry to correct you. Note: it does not usually work on people with applied expertise in finance, which is irritating but the reasons are obvious upon reflection.
B. There’s a lot of value in different explanations of the same phenomena. After all, if the common knowledge within econ was sufficiently explanatory, it would be common knowledge for us all already and you would have had no doubts. I find it helps a lot to have multiple people/groups pointing at the same thing, so I can mentally triangulate.
Or it signals you’ve decided to write for a ‘non-econ’, or lay-, audience. (You could prefix econ posts with ‘part of Econ for beginners’ or something like that if you wanted it to be explicit.)
I found myself in a situation like: “if this is common knowledge within econ, writing an explanation would signal I’m not part of econ and hence my econ opinions are low status”, but decided to go ahead anyway.
It’s good you found it helpful. I’m wondering if equilibria like the above is a mechanism preventing important stuff from being distilled.
I think this is the strongest possible argument for writing something.
A. I don’t always know the true status of my opinions on a subject; there’s no faster way to get such information than to voice the opinion and collect corrections. I routinely used this trick in school on professors, and it works on most any other kind of expert: if you can’t get their attention, make a slightly wrong assertion on purpose, and they will hurry to correct you. Note: it does not usually work on people with applied expertise in finance, which is irritating but the reasons are obvious upon reflection.
B. There’s a lot of value in different explanations of the same phenomena. After all, if the common knowledge within econ was sufficiently explanatory, it would be common knowledge for us all already and you would have had no doubts. I find it helps a lot to have multiple people/groups pointing at the same thing, so I can mentally triangulate.
Or it signals you’ve decided to write for a ‘non-econ’, or lay-, audience. (You could prefix econ posts with ‘part of Econ for beginners’ or something like that if you wanted it to be explicit.)