The likely return of expert authority

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Slight bias here as I'm on my way to being a polymath (second graduate degree in a field different than my first), but I tend to agree with this thinking. One area where I find this especially egregious is in climate policy.

To craft a good climate policy we need simultaneous knowledge of climate science, several engineering fields, and economics at a minimum. There are possibly more areas I haven't considered, and a case could be made for something like social psychology. I see many people arguing for climate policy based only on climate science which is likely to lead to bad outcomes. I see other people arguing for climate policy based on only economics which has potential for very bad outcomes.

It's impossible to impart all the necessary knowledge into one person. What we need is a person who knows enough of all the areas to understand the complete picture and coordinate experts in each of the fields.

Instead climate policy will probably be crafted by some lawyer or maybe a climate phd.

I realized that I mis-remembered a very important fact: 60% of the patients in the Ketamine group had respiratory arrest or depression severe enough to require intubation and mechanical ventilation (i.e. the paramedics thought they were at imminent risk of suffocating), but none of those patients ended up dying. The rate of intubation in the Haldol group was 4%. I probably conflated it with the Markingson case.

Normally the "minimal risk" exemption to informed consent rules applies to things like anonymized epidemiology studies or blood-draws on minors (who legally can't consent). I've never heard of OHRP classifying a study with a 60% rate of complications requiring lifesaving intervention as "minimal risk," and I'm not sure they even signed off on this one. (OHRP lacks the authority to charge people; they can only cut federal research funding, and I'm not sure if the federal government paid for the HCMC study.)

Well they're already there, and so is the evidence to prosecute them. So the real question is which administration would be more helpful in doing that.

Throwing a large number white collar professionals in prison would terrify a lot of the Bush-Republicans and Clinton-Democrats who form the backbone of Biden's coalition. So I can't imagine Biden doing that even if he wanted to (nor would his AG, even to the extent of using federal law to pressure states to prosecute, which is the only thing the AG could do anyway).

It's probably not a high priority for Trump, but at least his base wouldn't mind. And he's been an opportunist with a willingness to nuke the defective old order, even in cases where there isn't a partisan advantage. (See his crackdown on Lockheed's cost overruns, his pardons and sentencing reform, the canning of Boeing's Air Force One replacement, and his chewing-out of out generals for having no exit strategy after two decades of war and no sense of urgency to make one.)

I'm actually not too bothered by Biden's promise to 'trust science,' even though it's something of a contradiction in terms. What bothers me more is that I can't think of a single instance of him questioning a mainstream academic claim, even one of the statistical train-wrecks that come out of second-rate humanities departments. He even used one of those to justify his position on campus sexual assault tribunals. (It was a remote-survey with a 20% response rate and a definition of sexual assault that included anything that made a person feel uncomfortable after the fact - a definition that would make most sexually active men assault victims several times over.)

Partisan issues aside, Aspies would benefit a lot from taking these sorts of legal issues more seriously. Neither party really cares, but there are opportunities to win here or there. Instead of being diverted by issues that NTs care about, why not ask them 'What's in it for us? Why should I give you my vote?'

No, he can't do anything until after the inauguration. And given recent precedent, if anyone in his transition team talks to a foreign official about the Paris Agreement, the Senate judiciary committee could investigate them for violating the Logan Act He also has to worry about impeachment if Republicans do well in the midterm elections, although I doubt they'd impeach him if they don't have the votes to convict. But this is a crazy time, so who knows?

Don't forget, a return to sanity, as well as peace and quiet. I look forward to the next four years.

I see the conspiracy theorists are already warming up for the next four years...

@Fnord, I ignored your earlier post because your argument was anticipated and answered at the very beginning of the original post on this thread. If you can't be bothered to read even two sentences into a thread, why post at all?

Now your best is effort is an ad hominem against someone you're too evasive to name. Why not spit it out? You couldn't find a friendlier audiance for your views that WP, so the only thing you could be afraid of here is being wrong.

The fact that I oppose the QAnon party line should not be held against me.  Have a nice day!

But we already have THIS expert in authority:

There's zero chance of that, since you quite literally didn't oppose anything. It seems that some people on this forum have an over-developed sense of victimhood.

For those who are interested, Glenn Greenwald (the Trump-critic who broke the Snowden whistleblower story) had a couple of excellent pieces recently about election-year misinformation and censorship:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/obama- ... des-admits

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/articl ... n-censored

I don't begrudge the media their hatred of Trump, since he certainly tried to earn it; but if their response is to mislead their own paying customers, they aren't any better than him.

Last edited by NobodyKnows on 12 Nov 2020, 5:37 pm, edited 4 times in total.

Have fun with your personal attacks. They will likely not last much longer.

I think it's also an academic manifestation of the Peter Principle:


Success as an undergraduate is mostly a measure of how quickly and reliably you perform sequential operations on stable data-sets; success in R&D (where I've spent the most time) tests your ability to handle many-variable entanglements with uncertainty about each variable. A lot of problems can't be factored.


Yale's John Tukey said something tangentially relevant to that:


Also Darwin:


It often pays to throw away insignificant digits, even a few significant ones in a first-pass.

Mods, I'm not sure if a personal attack needs to be directed at a specific person in order to violate the rules, but the post above seems to accuse other WP members of espousing anti-Semitic and sexually charged views on this thread, which is patently false. I re-read each post here, and there isn't a single one with even a vague or tangential connection to QAnon or any related meme.

Someone probably had pizza for dinner and it went to their head.

As a coder when things get tough there's always Ship of Theseus. I'm sure the sciences have to have some equivalent in the way of troubleshooting, and those who really care about results more than punching a clock should be willing to put in the extra effort. The trouble though - I do look around and see a lot of people who are LARPing their jobs, IMHO people should be either getting paid more in one direction or punished in the other (anything but becoming office political 'protected species').

Yes and no. Sometimes on framing a domain for hypotheses it's probably fine, and similarly the significant digits needed to build a bridge within tolerance vs. send a satellite to Pluto are quite different. Too much of that and the result is literally wrong, sort of one can de-res a picture down to four pixels or try dumbing something down far enough that it hits a limit where any further dumbing will distort the facts.

I'm big on institutional disconfirmation, thinking in particular of how Jonathan Haidt considers it - that many people are superstars in their own minds or absolutely right about any idea that's their own, and since they can't watch themselves they need other people who aren't thinking the way they are to hold their ideas up to scrutiny. The challenge with it - institutions themselves can fall prey to game theory and from that you get one militant type of person displacing less militant people, worse if all militants have the same mindset, institutional disconfirmation is lost, an echo chamber is born, and the downhill qualitative spiral begins.

Personal attacks are forbidden against non-public individuals and against groups that may contain WP users.
However, distancing oneself from a group irrelevant to the thread is not a personal attack.
Posting things wrong or irrelevant, while undesired, is not against the rules.