You can often learn about your own world by first understanding some other world, and then asking if your world is more like that other world than you had realized. For example, I just attended WorldCon
There does need to be a balance on how much one understands about a particular topic and implications of the interpretation from that understanding. Some times, hard core researchers too make the mistake of communicating findings that is purely based on their interpretation and less on the actual result of their experiments. On the other hand, Jules Verne wrote about Captain Nemo and his submarine in 1870, far before it's time. I am just relaying my fears about interpretations and how thoughtful one must be, whether an expert or not.
"You can often learn about your own world by first understanding some other world, and then asking if your world is more like that other world than you had realized."
Amen, brother. Douglas Hofstadter's 1985 essay "A Person Paper on Purity in Language" used this approach very effectively to shed light on the sexism of typical English usage, vividly depicting a parallel world whose English is black/white racist to roughly the same degree that *this* world's English was (and largely still is) female/male sexist.
If the thesis is that people pay to see famous people talk because they wish to be associated with famous people, and not because they are seeking the most informative speakers, then the question is not so much whether there are people with more expertise than the famous people, so much as whether there are people with greater claim to expertise.
Reputation doesn't necessarily lag achievement. Often our responses to achievements are impressionistic: what's happening now is most important. Most thinkers we regard as important today will be forgotten in a few generations. (As in: who was Talcott Parsons?)
In defense of myself and fellow SF writers who do convention panels, the expertise we bring to discussions of the future is our skill at speculation, and on how fiction (it's a science FICTION convention, after all) can make use of things. So if we're talking about the future of, say, wearable technology, I'm the one who points out that people might take to "self-surveillance" wearing body cameras in all interactions as a safeguard, with the resultant decline in the value of privacy. And that in turn leads me to think about how one would write a murder mystery in that kind of setting. I don't know any more than the average WIRED reader about wearable tech, but I can make up stuff, and that's what the audience pays to hear.
As a related noted, Robin Hanson is the walking Plato among us. If history is just (and we wont kill ourselves with nukes etc), he has to be there with Popper, Newton, Leibniz etc.
Either way -- whether the decision is explained by the quality of experts in the area or something else -- your post has made me mull over the areas where I do and don't trust experts to inform my thoughts.
Where is convincing evidence of this? And if these experts exist what's a reliable means of identifying them? The replication crisis, and the well documented left leaning bias in the social sciences, makes me skeptical that the obvious experts are actually experts, and I don't see an easy way to identify experts outside of that.
Storytelling ability seems as good a heuristic as any.
More broadly speaking, if you are a person who's attained a position of high status, that's a demonstrative proof that you know something about how human society works. You mention "generals, judges, politicians, CEOs, rich folks, athletes, and actors". All of those jobs except athlete basically require you to be an expert with people to attain them. And I don't see people pretending that athletes are experts on how society works.
Related - http://paulgraham.com/speak...
There does need to be a balance on how much one understands about a particular topic and implications of the interpretation from that understanding. Some times, hard core researchers too make the mistake of communicating findings that is purely based on their interpretation and less on the actual result of their experiments. On the other hand, Jules Verne wrote about Captain Nemo and his submarine in 1870, far before it's time. I am just relaying my fears about interpretations and how thoughtful one must be, whether an expert or not.
"You can often learn about your own world by first understanding some other world, and then asking if your world is more like that other world than you had realized."
Amen, brother. Douglas Hofstadter's 1985 essay "A Person Paper on Purity in Language" used this approach very effectively to shed light on the sexism of typical English usage, vividly depicting a parallel world whose English is black/white racist to roughly the same degree that *this* world's English was (and largely still is) female/male sexist.
It sometimes adds to a discussion of X to include individuals particularly gifted with imaginative capacity.
If the thesis is that people pay to see famous people talk because they wish to be associated with famous people, and not because they are seeking the most informative speakers, then the question is not so much whether there are people with more expertise than the famous people, so much as whether there are people with greater claim to expertise.
Corollary of Peter's Principle?
Reputation doesn't necessarily lag achievement. Often our responses to achievements are impressionistic: what's happening now is most important. Most thinkers we regard as important today will be forgotten in a few generations. (As in: who was Talcott Parsons?)
If the panels on topic X mainly discussed how X might be used when writing a story, I'd agree with you. But they mostly talk just about X.
In defense of myself and fellow SF writers who do convention panels, the expertise we bring to discussions of the future is our skill at speculation, and on how fiction (it's a science FICTION convention, after all) can make use of things. So if we're talking about the future of, say, wearable technology, I'm the one who points out that people might take to "self-surveillance" wearing body cameras in all interactions as a safeguard, with the resultant decline in the value of privacy. And that in turn leads me to think about how one would write a murder mystery in that kind of setting. I don't know any more than the average WIRED reader about wearable tech, but I can make up stuff, and that's what the audience pays to hear.
He should aspire to Aristotle, not Plato. Aristotle was better on a lot of stuff and happier.
Agreed.
As a related noted, Robin Hanson is the walking Plato among us. If history is just (and we wont kill ourselves with nukes etc), he has to be there with Popper, Newton, Leibniz etc.
There's a favorable mention of "Showing That You Care: The Evolution of Health Altruism" in https://www.bloomberg.com/v...
This is the perfect post, sums up the SFF crowd perfectly.
Either way -- whether the decision is explained by the quality of experts in the area or something else -- your post has made me mull over the areas where I do and don't trust experts to inform my thoughts.
Where is convincing evidence of this? And if these experts exist what's a reliable means of identifying them? The replication crisis, and the well documented left leaning bias in the social sciences, makes me skeptical that the obvious experts are actually experts, and I don't see an easy way to identify experts outside of that.
Storytelling ability seems as good a heuristic as any.
More broadly speaking, if you are a person who's attained a position of high status, that's a demonstrative proof that you know something about how human society works. You mention "generals, judges, politicians, CEOs, rich folks, athletes, and actors". All of those jobs except athlete basically require you to be an expert with people to attain them. And I don't see people pretending that athletes are experts on how society works.
The beginning of The Glass Bead Game describes exactly this phenomena.