David_J_Balan comments on A Valuable Asset in Your Intellectual Portfolio is Not the Same as a Good Guide - Less Wrong
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Comments (8)
You have. To quote from your article:
When I boil down your post+comment and look for sense, what I get is something prosaic like 'some people are so expert in a narrow area that their opinion alone is enough for me, but otherwise aren't very good on average; other people are that expert, but in a broader area'.
The point is that these are two very different kinds of valuable advisers, but the distinction is often missed.
And while I do think in real life there is something of a dichotomy between "people whose final judgment I trust on questions like X," and "people whose final judgment I don't trust but who I still want to hear what they have to say," I think a similar point could be made with more than two categories.
Perhaps you mean to divide the population into the following three categories: (1) people who can convince you without argument, (2) people who can convince you with argument, and (3) people who can't convince you even with argument; and the thesis of the post is "Not everyone in (2) is in (1)".