= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ChristianKl comments on Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (289)
Further thoughts on Imaginary Expertise...
I'm currently studying a final-year undergrad course in the mathematical underpinnings of statistics. This course has three prerequisite courses, all of which have the word "statistics" or "statistical" in the title. While the term has obviously come up beforehand, it was only a couple of chapters ago that we were given a formal definition for what a "statistic" is, (in the context of parameter sufficiency).
It occurred to me that if someone was ignorantly mouthing off about statistics, and you wanted to shut them up, you could do a lot worse than to ask "so, what exactly is a statistic?"
I've noticed beforehand that "so what exactly is money?" has a similar effect for economics pseudo-blowhards, and "so what exactly are numbers?" for maths. It's worth noting that these questions aren't even the central questions of those disciplines, (insofar as such broad categories have central questions), and they don't necessarily have canonical answers, but completely blanking on them seems indicative of immature understanding.
I've now taken to coming up with variants of these for different disciplines I think I know about.
I'm not sure this has something to do with Imaginary expertise. If you ask a 10 year old kid what money happens to be, it probably gives you a straightforward answer.
On the other hand an expert might understand flaws of various different definitions of money and therefore won't give you a straightforward answer.
This isn't about whether or not one can provide a straightforward answer. It's whether or not one is even aware that the question has a non-obvious answer. Saying "actually, that's a complicated question" is a more virtuous answer than providing some unsubstantiated, ad-hoc response that falls apart under the slightest scrutiny.
It most poignantly ties in with imaginary expertise as both arise from the illusion of explanatory depth, (i.e. "I am familiar with this, therefore I understand it")