Nobody knows what's going on

https://www.raptitude.com/2024/06/nobody-knows-whats-going-on/

by herbertl • 2 years ago

225 218 2 years ago

nox101• 2 years ago

First hand experience is certainly better than second hand accounts bit it can be just as wrong. My example woild be, going to some foreign country, getting a few first hand experiences, then assuming those experiences match the norm in that country when the don't.

brokenmachine• 2 years ago

And things might change after you leave that country.

mr_toad• 2 years ago

In some countries the part the tourists get to see are like a completely different country.

paulcole• 2 years ago

Which countries are like this?

Tao33002• 2 years ago

Similarly, a lot of people believe in what we could call "ghosts" based on firsthand experience, yet the expert consensus is that there is no such thing.

mistermann5• 2 years ago

Expert consensus does not define the state of objective reality, it only alters people's beliefs about it.

Also, an absence of evidence is not proof of absence, though it usually appears that it is.

Gormo3• 2 years ago

It'd bad to rely on a small selection-biased sample of anything as an indicator of the general case, regardless of whether the sample data is acquired firsthand or secondhand.

ashwinne4• 2 years ago

There’s a way around this, but it’s not fun or easy. It’s to listen to only the experts on that tiny sliver of a domain in which they are experts in. (And don’t listen to that expert when they talk about something that’s not their expertise .) This means listening to the expert on caves and not to the social media loving billionaire.

lamename• 2 years ago

This is the correct answer. I'd add _multiple_ experts, because even they can disagree depending on the topic, which is expected and healthy. And even then, realize that experts can be wrong, but they're much less likely to be wrong than <random skeptic>.

ashwinne4• 2 years ago

That is right. Listen to multiple experts and see what is the cluster/mean of an answer they are crystallizing around. And if they all have different answers, then it means that there is no clear answer for your question (yet).

Erem• 2 years ago

The tough thing about this approach is that the borders of each expert’s sliver of knowledge is not known to the reader, and maybe not even to the author themselves.

On top of that, individual experts still carry their own biases in their heads, and they lack any sort of editorial board to service the reader by separating knowledge from bias.

It’s easy for me to cast stones but I also have no answer. The best I’ve come to is to read broadly on topics you need to truly know and compare what you find in your sources. For less important topics just accept that you are likely off the mark and have much to learn.

jameshart• 2 years ago

During the early days of the pandemic, as advice to wear masks started to propagate into the population, and laypeople started to have to develop familiarity with concepts like ‘N95’, a community of helpful experts (often nurses and doctors, people with actual qualifications and real experience) piped up to tell the world that they had been trained in the proper use of PPE, and that there were very important donning and doffing procedures that needed to be followed (not touching the outside of the mask, eg), without which ordinary untrained mask users were going to be exposed to enormous risks. If you tried to use such masks without following these procedures you might as well just rub a dead bat on your face.

The thing is, though, that the PPE handling requirements which practitioners like nurses and doctors are trained in, for working in a clinical environment with patients who are highly infectious or highly vulnerable to infection, are not the same as the PPE handling requirements for walking around a supermarket during a public health emergency. Public health usage of masks was not supposed to solve the same problems as masks solve in surgery or in infectious disease care contexts.

Experts are vulnerable to having highly specific knowledge about how something works in a very narrow domain, but overestimating how well that knowledge applies to even quite closely related nearby domains.

dilyevsky• 2 years ago

How do you know if someone is an expert in something without being an expert yourself?

danielvf• 2 years ago

There's an entirely legitimate question here behind this quip.

I don't think there's a magical answer, but one approach I've found is to try to be a mini expert in a tiny, tiny slice of a bigger area (usually bridging over knowledge from some adjacent area I know). This means that I can then evaluate those who talk about this tiny area, and get a good baysian guess as to there broader expertise from there.

xanderlewis4• 2 years ago

It depends on the field of expertise.

Some fields are such that they are hard to be expert in, but it’s trivially easy to verify expertise when observed. For example, playing tennis. It’s easy to identify a good tennis player even if you can’t play tennis at all. Another classic example is cooking. Even the most caveman-like philistine knows good food.

On the other hand, for some fields, verifying expertise (or ‘mastery’) is as hard as achieving it. Academic disciplines — particularly technical ones like science — are examples. In those cases, you probably have to rely on a trusted authority to verify legitimacy. Without that, you can’t distinguish the accomplished experts from the crackpot blowhards.

offmycloud• 2 years ago

My first test is to ask the expert to explain a complicated concept in their field, which I know a little bit about, in plain language that anyone can understand. Asking a few follow-up questions can usually separate the true experts from the fakes.

ashwinne4• 2 years ago

Typically someone who has spent their life working/researching/teaching in that sliver of a domain. It is also important to remember that experts start losing their expertise once they have retired or no longer actively working in that domain.

So you are looking for someone with many years of work experience in being an IC or lead or CEO or a researcher with a lab or PhD in that domain with lots of papers in highly respected/ranked conferences/journals. In domains you have no idea about, you might need to first read a book or general article which links back to such experts/sources and then it is easy to find the cluster of those experts in that domain.

layer8• 2 years ago

Why should we listen to you, are you an expert on who to listen to? ;)

harry8• 2 years ago

Yep totally and I agree expertise in one field means nothing in another. But I'm also old enough to have listened to a theoretical physicist on NASA's issues including the space shuttle challenger disaster. His thoughts have become regularly cited across many domains. He most certainly was not a rocket engineer.

    "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

--Richard P. Feynman

smegger001• 2 years ago

As I recall in that case he did a experiment to test his theory, (he chilled a sample of material the O-ring was made of and observered the result) and proved his hypothesis. The scientific method at work. You dont need to be a expert at everything when you have the resources to do adaquite research and experimentally test theories.

madmountaingoat• 2 years ago

I believe you have to listen to the experts on the topic, consider their biases and motivation, contrast the varying viewpoints, compare the philosophical or scientific foundations of the arguments against your researched world view, and either reach a conclusion or leave the question unanswered. More the later.

Keegs• 2 years ago

This is off topic, but can anyone tell where the photo with the caption “The situation is developing” was taken?

There aren’t many clues in the image, but the travel ad and outdoor dining point to somewhere tropical. Looks like a cool place.

leetrout• 2 years ago

Edit: wrong photo originally.

Chiang Mai

https://unsplash.com/photos/a-city-street-with-a-puddle-of-w...

---

Taken in Bali.

https://unsplash.com/photos/close-up-photo-of-earth-globe-v6...

B1FF_PSUVM• 2 years ago

"and the details are all false"

(Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, June 11, 1807)

kelseyfrog• 2 years ago

That's what's so fun about deciding that you have a vanishing small slice of sorcery over the spectacle.

From a starting point of mereological nihilism, you can absolutely play to people's desire for ontological certainty. For many, many, many, things, what's true is simply the number of people who believe it so.

xianshou• 2 years ago

"As George Orwell said, 'The most fundamental mistake of man is that he thinks he knows what’s going on. Nobody knows what’s going on.'"

(spoiler) The author reveals at the end that this quote was made up and falsely attributed to Orwell.

The most ironic part of this article is that the spurious quote will probably now make its way across the internet, whereas the disclaimer will not. Emerson actually did say “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me” - and after I've forgotten this article, I will probably remember that Orwell said no one knows what's going on.

ahi• 2 years ago

Now I'm suspicious of your Emerson quote.

sublinear• 2 years ago

As soon as I read that quote I immediately searched to verify and stopped reading the rest of the blog post.

I found another blog quoting this one, but pointing out the quote was fake, and another vaguely similar quote:

"Q: What is a fundamental mistake of man's? A: To think that he is alive, when he has merely fallen asleep in life's waiting-room." - Idries Shah

labster• 2 years ago

Given the topic, I assumed the quote was probably false the first time I read it. It pays to be a little paranoid about everything, and hold most of one’s beliefs only shallowly.

hooo• 2 years ago

I love this comment. It succinctly pulls it all together!

Barrin92• 2 years ago

what that actually reveals, and explains one of the authors questions, why most things at all still work despite this, is that the particularities of statements don't matter much.

If there's something useful in the made up quote that is why it's going to be proliferated, whether XY said it doesn't matter, there's not really any practical harm in that false attribution. This is also why crowdsourced predictions are remarkable accurate (and in fact often outperform experts, see Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner), despite most members of the crowd being wrong. As long as the wrong people aren't correlated in some way the average is a really good approximation.

Most stuff being noise and only some stuff being signal is just how the world works in general, it's not even really an insight.

SamBam• 2 years ago

Well, Perplexity sure believes George Orwell wrote it.

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/who-wrote-The-UA.znXC3SXGjv...

(AI search engines are just going to get crappier and crappier as more junk is put in the web.)

sanex• 2 years ago

Hilariously sourcing this article

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

The problem with quotes on the internet is that you never know if they are just made up.

- Abraham Lincoln

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

About 10 years ago I accepted that I didn't know what was going on, and I also realized that even if I did, 98% of it doesn't affect me in the slightest way.

I used to watch the news every day and try to stay informed about politics and candidates and to some extent sports and celebrities and other current events. Now I don't. None of it affects me or my day-to-day life. I'm a lot less stressed about stuff and I have more time for stuff that matters to me.

bhelkey• 2 years ago

I too want to be informed but have been very disappointed with the sensationalism of news sites.

One solution I found is this service that texts one sentence, fact based summaries of 8-10 current events every morning [1].

An alternative free solution is the Wikipedia current events portal [2].

[1] https://thenewpaper.co/

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

ruszki• 2 years ago

None of it affects me or my day-to-day life.

I think it affects you, and everybody.

Just after Russia started to attack Ukraine more intensely again in 2022, there was a chance that Hungary goes into a full blown dictatorship (without voting and such) on the side of Russia. Now, that would have affected me greatly since I’m travelling a ton, and I’m Hungarian, and I was there that time.

Also related to this, I need to pay attention to Hungary some level to tell my parents when to leave. Unfortunately, I started to fail with this, but it’ll be more important again, because the status quo which allowed to pretend democracy is under attack, and we could already see what happens then.

After COVID, it’s even more interesting your statement, because you were affected, and to be effective you had to know what are the “news”. In other words, how people fucked up things. Also, I should have been quite offended why my doctor didn’t want to see me, when I arrived sick from New York two days before the first lockdown there.

Also from the “news” it seems that the general trust between each others plummeted (shrinking number of real life connections, and increasing internet toxicity). That indicates the possibility that democracies are not the optimal strategy on individual level anymore. We need to prepare for that.

Because of the “news” I, my brother and his whole family, and about at least a quarter of my high school class left Hungary (whom I know about). None of these would have happened with the news of the 90s or early 2000s. So it definitely affects larger parts of population.

Since I’ve also started to not read daily news that much, I’m also quite sure that the lack of news is definitely good for my mental health. And I’m definitely more chill. But there is a possibility that I won’t predict something because of this, and I’ll loose money, time, health, or even friendships (I suck with remote connections with my friends).

nmaley• 2 years ago

I know Orwell's work pretty well, and I read that sentence, and thought to myself: "Cant remember where he said anything like that, but what the hell, I haven't read everything Orwell ever wrote". So I just rolled with it.

The cognitive load to fact check everything is too great, so we decide which sources we think are reliable and just accept them. The solution is not to disbelieve everything you are told, but to accept that some of the facts you have not checked might be wrong, and be prepared to re-evaluate when contrary evidence appears.

xanderlewis4• 2 years ago

“a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”

- (probably not) Mark Twain

xanderlewis4• 2 years ago

you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read.

This is interestingly close to what I think about claims of ChatGPT being ‘as good as an expert’ at, say, mathematics or medicine.

rozap2• 2 years ago

One thing a coworker said once that I think about a lot: ever read an article about a subject that you know a bit about, and invariably you come to the conclusion that the writer doesn't really have a good grasp on what they're talking about. Now think about all the articles you read about subjects that you don't know much about, why would the accuracy be any higher on those ones?

Kind of a bummer to think about.

taberiand• 2 years ago

That's Gell-Mann amnesia

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155538

aboodman• 2 years ago

That is discussed in the ... sigh, nevermind.

wait_a_minute2• 2 years ago

Now think about all the articles you read about subjects that you don't know much about, why would the accuracy be any higher on those ones?

Why wouldn't the accuracy be higher? Extrapolating that way from limited experience is not something I would personally do. I would read everything, learn gradually, and continue learning and testing information with experiments and more information.

ffsm8• 2 years ago

In the context of articles the answer is simple: because the journalist isnt the specialist, they likely just interviewed a few people and wrapped it up the article.

For comments it's a different story. You do occasionally get the real experts, but more often then not, you just get another mediocre human like myself that just voiced their opinion. Furthermore, there is a strong correlation with experts not commenting as they've got better things to do vs the average Joe that is commenting with little effort, essentially outputting significantly more comments. Another detrimental factor is that mentally unwell people will often output orders of magnitude more comments then everyone else, complicating everything even more.

pcloadletter_• 2 years ago

I've been thinking about this recently with internet comments on here, reddit, etc. There are very few topics on which I'd consider myself an expert, but whenever one comes up, the "top" comment (often something contrarian/snarky) is always significantly incorrect.

roenxi3• 2 years ago

Are you claiming expertise in computing or non-computing topics? HN tends to be - as we might expect - quite good at computers and bad/average [0] at everything else.

I'd assume it is the same logic as comparative advantages in economics; it doesn't make sense for communities to become experts in everything. The only caveat is that people in the chattering communities (eg, journalists, influencers, celebrities) are some of the last to look to for informed opinions on reality since their speciality is attracting attention and telling stories rather than anything linked to success in the physical or academic worlds. They're often clever, just not involved in complex topics.

[0] average = bad. Goes to show how catastrophic dictatorships are that a democracy can consistently outperform one.

rconti• 2 years ago

I think this is a significant contribution to imposter syndrome. It took me a long time in life to realize that the confidence some people have in their opinions rarely comes from true expertise; rather, it comes from their personality.

sweeter• 2 years ago

100%. It's extra disastrous when the topic is polarizing or charged. The topic of US politics for example will very often work off of some false dichotomy or fundamentally flawed premise and twist into some horribly deformed conversation.

Try telling someone that "the process of voting doesn't work that way" or try to clear up some common misconception about the economy or crime and it just doesn't go anywhere. People have a lot of false assurance to back up their mode of thinking and it is nearly impossible to break that. In fact, there is an entire economy in vindicating people's beliefs which makes people even more assured.

I'm convinced the only proper stance on complex ideas, concepts and topics is that we shouldn't have the hubris to think that we completely understand something or even have a solid grasp.

slim• 2 years ago

I like the fact this applies to the comment you are commenting on since it is now the top comment :)

hanniabu6• 2 years ago

As someone that works in the crypto industry, I feel this every time I see the news or articles report on it, or comments here talking about it.

kennyloginz• 2 years ago

Honestly curious, what is the benefit of blockchain outside of providing evidence in court?

__loam3• 2 years ago

It would help if there were not multimillion dollar hacks and scams weekly.

RichardCA2• 2 years ago

As someone that works in the crypto industry, I feel this every time I see the news or articles report on it, or comments here talking about it.

It was the same way during the 90's Dot-Com era, journalists would explain the World Wide Web with word salad, e.g., the "Graphical portion of the Internet".

With regard to Crypto, I decline to discuss it without mentioning the 3Blue1Brown video, sometimes the gambit works and triggers a better discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4

And I love the comments in that video about being "Confused, but on a higher level".

WalterBright2• 2 years ago

I learned in the last 3-4 years to never take seriously an article about aviation by a journalist.

latkin2• 2 years ago

Did you read TFA? This exact phenomenon is discussed thoroughly in the post.

aaronax2• 2 years ago

Mind boggling. Though now I know that for all HN commenters, truly "nobody knows what's going on" (in the article).

jwilk• 2 years ago

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

averageRoyalty• 2 years ago

I was so confused. So many comments discussing this, all oblivious to that being the core of the article. I guess nobody knows anything here either...

throwaway7ahgb4• 2 years ago

For us old timers this is nothing new. For people that know what a 3 digit /. userid is, the meme of not reading the article is as old as internet news boards.

rozap2• 2 years ago

I described a time where a friend summarized this effect and how it stuck with me since, which is the same effect described in the article? And saying that it's a bummer to think about? I didn't say it was original insight on anyone's part, just that it was a sticky thought when it was wrapped up in a small 1 sentence explanation. You're right, there's no great insight in my comment, all it said was "yea this happens to me too all the time" but for some reason it got upvoted.

Should I only comment if I have a counterexample?

bradly2• 2 years ago

My experience working at Apple on both Music and Maps: anything that I had worked on that was reported on was usually wildly inaccurate. Mainstream news, bloggers, HN comments... so much assumption and usually way off.

_moof• 2 years ago

This has also been my experience working at multiple household names and reading coverage and comments about things I was working on.

rr808• 2 years ago

Absolutely true, but also people who know about a subject often can't see the forest for the trees and an outside perspective brings new detail you haven't seen before.

protectiveSheet• 2 years ago

A coworker of mine is fond of saying, “I believe everything I read in the New York Times except for the stuff I know about.”

richrichie• 2 years ago

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know." – Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

robotbikes• 2 years ago

And now just think of all of the people who will be getting their knowledge from LLMs which are literally making up stuff through statistical linguistic inference on a grand scale from hearsay.

czl• 2 years ago

LLMs are literally making up stuff through statistical linguistic inference on a grand scale from hearsay.

Hearsay being some personal "truth" it may be useful to know what the statistical average of that "truth" is. If we do it right perhaps we can get the various personal errors to cancel out.

xwolfi• 2 years ago

Since I've started working in finance, I find all those conspiracies about banks and "wall street" a bit cringe: HSBC is actually a nice bank, they helped me a lot, hedge funds do lose as much money as they make in aggregate across all of them because end of the day it's all a random 0-sum with losers paying winners, inside an investment bank, risk is very managed and boring, deal makers spend lots of time trying to reject proposals, loans are rarely predatory and not always easy to get because nobody wants bad payers, bonuses are scarse, etc.

The headlines about some crisis with uneducated comments about how rich bankers exploit the weaks make me hesitate to trust journalism. Often incompetence is way more prevalent than nefariousness ...

Each time I say stuff like that I get comments saying "maybe but it's not a reason to defend banks", completely missing that it's exactly my point: this hatred of banks is a bit irrational, I think it's fine sometimes to defend them...

vundercind• 2 years ago

The flip side of this is that I’ve repeatedly seen people in some industry subject to new regulation claim that some effect of it is an unfortunate accident (when it’s actually the point, the behavior it’s stopping that you think is good is actually unethical and system-wide contributes to huge problems in ways that ought not be hard to understand) or that much-needed regulation is some terrible mistake that people will regret when we have strong evidence (like, real world examples) to the contrary.

Granted I’ve mostly seen that in the real estate world, so maybe other industries are less-shit about saying plainly dumb stuff based on “insider knowledge” (self-serving bullshit, actually)

See also: cops and all manner of things, like the relative riskiness of their own job (and which parts of it are risky—all that driving is a lot of the risk, and Covid-19 vs guns is a fun comparison for some years) or how dangerous it is to be within one meter of a small amount of fentanyl or whatever, or how we’ll all just super regret it if we keep them from trampling on civil liberties (common view, not making that up)

Sometimes the insiders know better and everyone else is wrong. Sometimes the insiders are all sorts of mixed up over some comically basic shit.

Anotheroneagain6• 2 years ago

"loans are rarely predatory" misses the point why they are bad. They are bad for the economy because it's you (not the market) who decides who gets resources.

rayiner• 2 years ago

This is my exact feeling about legal coverage. It’s not clear to me that most journalists have even a middle school understanding of what “law” is.

anotherhue• 2 years ago

Gell-Mann amnesia https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155538

dclowd9901• 2 years ago

For me, it’s often a case of semantics. Like, if I watch a YouTube car repair video, and the presenter is diagnosing an issue and says something like “ok, so we can see here the battery is draining far too quickly so I better check the alternator first,” in my experience, it’s rarely the alternator and often either a bad battery or a short somewhere. My first check is either of those two things. I might eventually arrive at the alternator but it’s all just semantics and interpretation at a certain level. I don’t feel like they’re breathtakingly _wrong_, they just probably have had a different experience than me, leading them to a different conclusion.

Caveat: I often work on old cars where a short is far more likely.

foogazi• 2 years ago

You are describing Gell-Mann amnesia

xarope• 2 years ago

Maybe you are referring to articles on the internet that are meant for SEO?

The internal white papers I've written and also help co-author (which are for discourse/dissertation on successful project implementations and to be used as reference for future work), or when on a stint with IBM doing ITSO Redbooks, were (are?) highly accurate, and involved subject matter experts (which, as the name would imply, were the SMEs that people would contact specifically as THE experts in that field; and, back then, we were really the experts).

OK Ok, you can stay on my lawn for a while longer... /j

nagonago• 2 years ago

Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy: "Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge."[0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/27/us/required-reading-smith...

vunderba• 2 years ago

This is why I'm rather bemused when people "freak out" about LLMs hallucination rates. The number of comments I've seen on Hacker news (ostensibly the intellectual sister of reddit) that make extraordinarily confident outlandish claims about various subjects with zero citations, sources, etc across what would otherwise be considered highly scientific disciplines - neuroscience is a particularly egregious offender - is far more worrisome to me than the latest hallucination from Gemini.

creer• 2 years ago

I have found people receptive to that observation though.

That is, it's not yet a widely noticed thing and I feel it helps to spread it around and people generally seem to welcome and understand the concept. It probably does not immediately change how they read - biases are very hard to fight. But it goes in the right direction.

yoyohello13• 2 years ago

I never really knew about, or thought about, this phenomenon until I started trying code generated by ChatGPT. Then I started to realize ChatGPT's answers seemed really good for programming languages I knew little about, but pretty bad for programming languages I knew a lot about.

Then I realized this probably applies to many different subjects.

alexpc201• 2 years ago

It's like thinking about how stupid the average person is and then realizing that half of humanity is even stupider.

yen223• 2 years ago

And then realising you don't actually know which person is "average" and how smart they are.

simianparrot• 2 years ago

Covid was the litmus test for me. I happened to know a lot about a lot of topics that became wildly reported on, from virology to immunology, and I had to watch in horror as every single media presence and expert weighed in with at best non-existent data to support major changes to existing wisdom, and at worst (and most common) obvious lies that contradicted not just available science but the very nature of how viruses operate.

I can’t go back to ignorance ever again.

koonsolo• 2 years ago

That's why everyone should read books written by experts, instead of articles.

lr1970• 2 years ago

This is known as the Gell-Mann amnesia effect [0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_Crichto...

dvfjsdhgfv• 2 years ago

That's why I prefer to read books by scientists that are established in the field. Granted, I might miss some spectacular insights that some revolutionists might propose, but I can be relatively sure that most of what I read is actually true in the sense of representing reality relatively accurately.

red-iron-pine• 2 years ago

Michael Crichton of Jurassic Park fame described this as Gell-Mann Amnesia

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect#:~:t....

LargoLasskhyfv• 2 years ago

That 'bummer' has a name, has been put into the frame of fame:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect /

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...

jaredcwhite• 2 years ago

It's like when we see people "do programming" in TV shows/movies and laugh at how goofy it is. I suspect most technical professions are exactly like that, we just don't realize it most of the time.

QuantumGood• 2 years ago

Even worse when there are slightly creative solutions that haven't reached conventional wisdom status yet. They're out there, but almost impossible to find.

rapjr9• 2 years ago

The accuracy of other articles can be higher or lower because other people researched and wrote them. This is why people tend to have favorite reporters and favorite news outlets. They do not trust every thing they read, they look for people who seem to reliably report the truth as they know it, and those people/outlets they _tend_ to trust. People are naturally skeptical. Often they just read to entertain themselves or to gather topics to discuss with friends or coworkers later. That doesn't mean they believe it all. You can read all the UFO articles but that doesn't mean you believe in UFO's. You might instead find them interesting as a sign that the military ignoring UFO's mean enemy spy drones can easily sneak in and spy on maneuvers, a big vulnerability that the military is _supposed_ to be cognizant of, but is apparently ignoring.

MisterDizzy• 2 years ago

I've been thinking for a while about the "reality is a simulation" idea. It may not be literally true, but it certainly is useful to try on as a temporary LARP. The more you think of things that way, the more it starts to make sense in a weird way. Nearly all media, that is to say nearly all stimuli/input, is irreflective of reality. Nobody knows what's going on.

an-allen• 2 years ago

I was listening to the latest Lex Friedman podcast from the Amazon jungle and there was an interesting comment that the “reality is a simulation” folks have never had to survive in the Amazon and that the belief is somewhat of a side effect of the relative safety of everyday life.

imchillyb• 2 years ago

The realm of the quantum does not care about the Amazonian wildlife and the converse is also true.

The brilliant minds that believe we are indeed in a simulation have extrapolated this concept from the weirdness that is found within the realm of quantum, the realm of the sub micro and nano.

Religious folk believe we live in some sort of simulation as well: "You are travelers and sojourners here. This is not your home. God is of spirit not of flesh."

Don't know what 'spirit' is, but it's not carbon-based matter. Don't know what home is, but it's evidently not here. The Bible suggests that nothing here is real and the only real things are found in the spiritual realm.

Simulation, or manufactured space, it doesn't really matter to us. Like Mr. Friedman pointed out, we have to deal with the space around us and whether the space around us is simulation or not is irrelevant.

mistermann5• 2 years ago

The media projects a misrepresentation of reality into people's minds.

People believe it is representative, they literally link to it as proof of their claims.

In this way (and there are many others), reality is simulated.

Another way is Indirect Realism, knowledge of which is rarely in working memory.

Another way is that people believe there is only one possible form of simulation, as in "the" simulation theory.

joegibbs• 2 years ago

This is what Simulacra and Simulation is about, or at least what I think it’s about since I haven’t actually read it myself.

wait_a_minute2• 2 years ago

If you ever read an article on a subject with which you have a lot of first-hand experience, you’ll notice that they always get major things wrong – basic facts, dates, names of people and organizations, the stated intentions of involved parties, the reasons a thing is happening – things even a novice in the space would know better about.

No, not always.

wavemode• 2 years ago

Can you offer a counterexample?

WalterBright2• 2 years ago

If you design and build an airplane and it flies as expected, you know a lot about aeronautical engineering.

You cannot pretend it is flying when it isn't.

One of the reasons I chose to be an engineer.

gary_0• 2 years ago

GPS wouldn't work if relativity was wrong. Radio wouldn't work if our theory of electromagnetism was wrong. Satellites wouldn't stay in orbit if Newton was wrong. Modern medicine wouldn't work if our understanding of biology was wrong. And chemistry, physics, astronomy, mathematics and so forth all overlap, all require each other to some degree... and each of these interconnected areas of knowledge need to be correct, because we want to use it to build things or solve problems or make discoveries.

That's why I like science and engineering, it's a whole structure that, while not perfect or complete, has self-reinforcement and self-correction built in. And if it's right about something, the proof will be in the pudding. Otherwise, like you say, your airplane will fall out of the sky.

mistermann5• 2 years ago

was wrong

This is a true/false Boolean is it?

And if it's right about something, the proof will be in the pudding.

What if it's probabilistic, and rare?

lahvak• 2 years ago

I believe you've got it backwards. The theory of relativity would be wrong if GPS did not work, the theory of electromagnetism would be wrong if radio did not work, etc. The only thing that working radio tells us is that certain mathematical model that we call theory of electromagnetism happens to agree with the real world (whatever that is) to a sufficient precision. For many purposes (like for example building radios), that is enough.

MrJohz2• 2 years ago

To a certain extent I agree, but I think you're missing a lot of nuance there. Boeing, for example, have built a lot of planes that fly as expected. The problem is the ones they built that don't: where bits fall off them or where their sensor systems don't work.

So do Boeing know a lot about aeronautical engineering, or are they just guessing? To what extent are they just pretending their planes are flying?

everly• 2 years ago

An educated populace can better resist such issues. The solution is better journalism/reporting and better education.

Instead, the knee jerk reaction seems to be calling for further hollowing out of public education and less investment in traditional news media. I fear what that looks like after a few more decades.

gonzo41• 2 years ago

RE investment in traditional news media.

No one trusts them anymore because they have all become partisan. The news nowdays doesn't seem to be about what happened. It's all takes. People disengage as a result. They watch it like sport.

metabagel• 2 years ago

Smug people tend to be wrong, because they are emotionally entangled with their beliefs.

TheAlchemist2• 2 years ago

A perfect example of this, is stock market reporting. On a daily basis, stocks move, sometimes a lot - but apart from the people who make them move (and even then, it can be impossible for them to know it's them !), nobody knows why.

But a lot of people, without knowledge of finance or economics, want to know *why* stocks moved. And so, we have an entire industry reporting on a daily basis, without any direct knowledge about the thing they are reporting about !

As the author said, there are few penalties for bullshit, and many rewards !

rsanek• 2 years ago

I don't know if I'd go this far. If a company reports earnings far below what they previously gave guidance on, the stock pretty reliably falls.

elijaht• 2 years ago

Disagree- plenty of times in my career the company I work for beats/misses guidance and the stock moves in the “wrong” direction. To the point where it was independently a joke in multiple companies

TheAlchemist2• 2 years ago

Yes, but not always - in the case it goes in the opposite direction, they will write 'investors priced it in already' :D

There are of course tangible things that can help explain movements, but truth is - very very rarely those writing the articles know what's going on on the market.

Another funny thing in the market, mostly recently, is that earnings are announced after hours - and most of the movement happen in those after hours - which doesn't really make sense, since the liquidity is very very limited. So how come that just following the earnings, the price of say Tesla will go +10% in the after hours, and then stay pretty much at that level the next day, when real investors and big funds start trading ? Who knows...

kjkjadksj2• 2 years ago

The day of stock reports are such crap its actually entertaining to read. Especially when the market whiplashes a couple minutes after the midday report and they need to come up with a narrative. Most of the moves could honestly be summed up with “it was noon so a bunch of hft cron jobs turned on right then and bought or sold” or “nice numbers ending in 0 or 5 have their own gravity pull”

Anotheroneagain6• 2 years ago

Nobody knows why, because it's meaningless noise. It's just what the stock was traded for in that particular moment, somebody offered to trade for that much and somebody accepted that offer which alone is a meaningless number. You need some longer term average according to volume, not points in time to gain any meaningful information.

tommiegannert• 2 years ago

My favorite style to dislike is "Fed sees inflation as astronauts are trapped on ISS." They really want to make it sound like a causal relationship, using "as" as "and [with unspoken implications; nudge, wink]" instead of simply posting two articles.

lextuto• 2 years ago

Here's a potentially relevant quote from "The Man Who Solved the Market" by Gregory Zuckerman[0].

"One day, a data-entry error caused the fund to purchase five times as many wheat-futures contracts as it intended, pushing prices higher. Picking up the next day’s Wall Street Journal, sheepish staffers read that analysts were attributing the price surge to fears of a poor wheat harvest, rather than Renaissance’s miscue. [...] “Any time you hear financial experts talking about how the market went up because of such and such—remember it’s all nonsense,” [Peter] Brown [CEO of Renaissance Technologies] later would say."

[0] https://www.gregoryzuckerman.com/the-books/the-man-who-solve...

throw0101a• 2 years ago

But a lot of people, without knowledge of finance or economics, want to know why stocks moved. And so, we have an entire industry reporting on a daily basis, without any direct knowledge about the thing they are reporting about !

They move due to information about the stock and the perception (which is a type of information) about the stock. But since you don't know when new information about a company/stock will become public, nor when the perceptional information about it will shift, the changes are effectively random:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street

And if there is new information about it, those that get it first (unlikely to be you) will be able to capitalize on in better; and as it spreads that information will take more and more of an effect on the stock price. To paraphrase William Gibson: the information is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

Uehreka• 2 years ago

A couple paragraphs in and I’m already like “Ah, here comes the Michael Crichton quote, the “papers’ full of ‘em” one.”

I’ve never read one of these that didn’t come off as unbearably smug. Like sure, discerning the truth is hard, duh. But the people who try their best to do it, even if they sometimes fail, are worth immeasurably more than the dead-souled people who decide “might as well sling bullshit since it’s impossible to be totally correct” (if that’s not what the article is saying out loud, it’s certainly what a lot of the commenters are saying)

Edit: Just to end on a positive note, I want to call out the one good piece of content in this genre, which takes Gell-Mann amnesia, flips it, inverts it, and then skewers Michio Kaku for trying to act like he knows about hurricanes: https://youtu.be/wBBnfu8N_J0?feature=shared

djaouen2• 2 years ago

This article reminds me of a quote from George Washington, leader of the Rebel Army in American Revolutionary lore. He said, "Dayum, these pretzels are makin me thirsty!!!!"

hindsightbias• 2 years ago

“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.”

— Superintendent Maillard

kstenerud• 2 years ago

The problem with knowing - of actually, REALLY, knowing - is that you can't do anything with it.

Not enough other people know, and so you find yourself fighting against the tide.

It gets lonely.

ookblah• 2 years ago

so how do people vet information and maintain this skepticism without devolving into full conspiracy-esque "trust no one", "everyone has an agenda" type thinking?

mistermann5• 2 years ago

One approach: apply skepticism to your own beliefs...learn to experience it like a game, so the natural (and culturally conditioned) human aversion to epistemology diminishes over time, or even reverses.

without devolving into full conspiracy-esque "trust no one", "everyone has an agenda" type thinking?

Should this necessarily be avoided? Are you asserting that it is not substantially true?

082349872349872• 2 years ago

Have a system. I like STASM (mid-XX): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212528

"If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports."

PS. It is not true that Linebarger was some furry rando.

moribunda• 2 years ago

The friend sitting on my fifteen-year-old couch knows I’m not independently wealthy.

Oh, right, because FI is about spending a lot on new things constantly...

calibas• 2 years ago

I was tangentially involved in a news story a few years ago. The reporter went to a small town, interviewed a few people, then wrote up an article. Only problem was they didn't actually interview anybody directly involved, it was a lot of hearsay from the small town rumor mill, which they reported as fact.

Nothing major about the story was changed, but I know some of the details were incorrect. It bugs me that these are now "facts", and places like Wikipedia confidently state these "facts" without anybody knowing the origin was just small town gossip.

caseyy• 2 years ago

csours• 2 years ago

A really useful meta-question is:

How much work is it to answer that question?

A few examples: Junior devs asking about how to do something - sometimes the answer is clear, there's a standard or a decision has already been made - sometimes someone has to do some work to decide how to proceed. Its easy for people to get frustrated when they think they asked a simple question, but at the point they ask, NO ONE knows the answer.

Do masks work? How much evidence of what types would it take to make a satisfying answer to this question? What would those study designs look like? How large would your sample size need to be? I think it would take a great deal of work just to design the studies and get them past ethical review boards, much less get them funded and completed.

Anything related to diet. Getting real answers takes way more work than can reasonably be done for anything more that the simplest questions.

---

cainxinth• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing

duckmysick2• 2 years ago

Plumbing knowledge, for example, is constantly tested by whether the place floods after you’ve advanced your theory about what pipe connects to what. You need to get it right because it costs you something when you get it wrong.

Sure, for obvious failures where water is leaking in a spectacular fashion. But there's tons of shoddy non-obvious projects that work and look fine now. The problems come down the road, years later. Usually these problems come from either cutting corners or working under constraints.

You know those horror stories programmers or sys admins trade? How they saw something and couldn't believe their own eyes? Plumbers have those too, in buckets.

Maybe this whole paragraph about the plumbing is just a meta commentary on the "nobody knows what's going on". In that case, disregard the above.

Nobody knows what's going on

Related Stories