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Mac comments on Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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 appreciate your reasoning, but...
First, I assume this exchange takes place among a group (part of my personal definition of “mouthing off”).
I further assume that your goal is to disparage the “pseudo-blowhard”.
Given these assumptions, your strategy can only succeed if you “blank” the pseudo-blowhard AND if the group doesn’t believe your question is trivial AND ALSO if the group does not confuse this blanking with a reasonable reaction to a surprisingly difficult question.
I think the odds are against you. Furthermore, if you do not succeed, I predict the group will think less of you. Your question will seem like a waste of time, an unwelcome redirection of the conversation, or a lame attempt to express your disagreement with the speaker.
Some people seem to have read the OP and thought "this guy is describing a way to socially humiliate people". I would have liked them to read it and think "this guy is describing a way of testing one's self-perceived understanding on a topic, informed by observations on how social humiliation seems to work".