I think this post labels an important facet of the world, and skillfully paints it with examples without growing overlong. I liked it, and think it would make a good addition to the book.
There’s a thing I find sort of fascinating about it from an evaluative perspective, which is that… it really doesn’t stand on its own, and can’t, as it’s grounded in the external world, in webs of deference and trust. Paul Graham makes a claim about taste; do you trust Paul Graham’s taste enough to believe it? It’s a post about expertise that warns about snake oil salesmen, while possibly being snake oil itself. How can you check? “there is no full substitute for being an expert yourself.”
And so in a way it seems like the whole rationalist culture, rendered in miniature: money is less powerful than science, and the true science is found in carefully considered personal experience and the whispers of truth around the internet, more than the halls of academia.
I think this post labels an important facet of the world, and skillfully paints it with examples without growing overlong. I liked it, and think it would make a good addition to the book.
There’s a thing I find sort of fascinating about it from an evaluative perspective, which is that… it really doesn’t stand on its own, and can’t, as it’s grounded in the external world, in webs of deference and trust. Paul Graham makes a claim about taste; do you trust Paul Graham’s taste enough to believe it? It’s a post about expertise that warns about snake oil salesmen, while possibly being snake oil itself. How can you check? “there is no full substitute for being an expert yourself.”
And so in a way it seems like the whole rationalist culture, rendered in miniature: money is less powerful than science, and the true science is found in carefully considered personal experience and the whispers of truth around the internet, more than the halls of academia.