korrents · piece

Quickly assessing the credibility of public experts

Stephan Guyenet · 30 Aug 2018

Others here said this too

Changing your mind in light of new facts should be celebrated rather than held against you.

Their wordsInability to change one’s mind is a hallmark of an irrational belief system.

Also said by David Heinemeier Hansson, Gergely Orosz, Pieter Levels

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Stephan Guyenet did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
People who explain everything with one big idea are bad at modelling the world, and the media selects for them because they sound confident.
Mental modelMany models, not one

Their wordsThe work of Philip Tetlock, PhD and others has shown that people who have one big idea to explain everything (“hedgehogs” or ideologues) are very bad at accurately modeling the world, predicting outcomes, and recommending effective actions.
Our reading
Changing your mind in light of new facts should be celebrated rather than held against you.
Mental modelProbabilistic thinking

Their wordsInability to change one’s mind is a hallmark of an irrational belief system.
Our reading
Nutrition is one of the domains where beliefs track group identity rather than evidence, so an expert's claims there deserve more suspicion than in physics.

Their wordsThe likelihood that someone is providing high-quality information in these domains is lower than in less controversial areas like physics or neuroscience.

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