experts aren't

It's not dead, but the classified advertisements that paid for high quality journalism have migrated to the web, and journalism has become rather like piano-playing - if you are good enough to make into the top 150 with inter national name recognition you can make real money at it, and everybody else has to find a day job.

The New Yorker cost enough and sells well enough that it can support amazin gly good journalism (but there's not enough of that to fill every issue).

John Larkin lacks the wit to recognise novelty. He certainly seems to lack the wit to recognise what Nassim Nicholas Taleb is actually saying in "The Black Swan".

Clearly not enough damage. Julian Barnes hasn't been nuked yet.

Although he's more creative fiction than journalism.

ly

It's still owned by the Hearst family, rather than Rupert Murdoch. John Lar kin has been trained to believe everything he reads in the Murdoch media, a nd he gags on stuff that doesn't match his regular diet of familiar misinfo rmation.

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John Larkin doesn't like being shown up as an ignorant egomaniac.

My only bit of electronic design to make it (17 citations) in the peer-revi ewed instrument literature was done in 1993, and got published in 1996. One of the elements of the published circuit was one that I'd thought up aroun d 1975, but never had a chance to put into practice until I could get my ha nds on programmable logic.

Since it worked when I finally could try it, it probably counts as a succes sful 1970's design.

Sure. Cursitor Doom doesn't need to be reminded of John Larkin's pratfalls, amusing as they can be.

NT at his intellectual best. At least he included the correctly spelled version of my name and the right honorific, but he did fail to snip his own junk, and John Larkin's which is - if anything - even more content-free.

Aren't you an expert at SOMETHING? If you are, you'll know that lots of uninformed 'common sense' is around, and you'll know that expertise can do .. better.

So, make the world a better place. Prefer informed opinion, 'expert opinion' because of the benefits of real expertise. And, don't think "it's only opinion", because it is NOT. It's "expert opinion", and is a lot pricier than "opinion" because it's worth it.

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black+swan

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hence many are wrong. We're told as children to put experts on pedestals, a nd many are unable to see past that. I've watched so many experts not even bothering to do the basic fact finding, and people making assumptions, fals e arguments, not knowing their subject as well as they think and so on. The truth is only a minority can navigate successfully through all those minef ields, and even when they do it still does not necessarily mean the conclus ions are correct.

t at odds with the world's total experience of experts so far.

capes me. It may reflect the fact that NT can't cope with the complications of reality, and oversimplifies his claims to the sort of stuff he can imag ine he understands.

You put them on peddetals again and again in s.e.d, despite the obvious fla ws.

for unversities and meteorology institutes, who think that anthropogenic gl obal warming is real and getting worse, and another bunch, many of whom get paid by the Heartlands Institute, who think that it isn't happening, and w ouldn't be a bad thing if it were.

tion to detect which ones have got it wrong. John Larkin - and apparently N T - seem to think that the experts that are paid by the fossil fuel extract ion industries are the ones that should be relied on.

yawn

t there was a UK market for about 140 personal computers - the device we we re working on at the time (as a telex replacement) was pretty much identica l with the original IBM PC.

I expect there were far more Apple IIs in homes than that in 80. The IBM cl aim was - relatively - more reasonable given that at that time computers we re multi-ton valve things.

jobs that computers were being used for at the time. The fact that a faster or cheaper computer might be used for different tasks didn't get into the computation.

yes, another way experts get things wrong

al expertise. Reality is a little more complicated than that.

In the post quoted above I said the exact opposite.

NT

more pointless junk from slowman

Yes... sometimes. There are also plenty of 'painted' people that are thought to be experts.

Sometimes yes. Sometimes it has negative value. Too many times for my liking.

NT

True (I presume!), but that doesn't change the point.

Simple observations...

Government failures are very public; quite right too.

Corporate failures can be (and are) swept under the carpet; OK, shrug.

Businessmen/businesses that want to take over state activities and profit from them can and do lie about what they will achieve. Quite /wrong/ too.

In the UK private enterprise can be significantly worse than the state.

There are far too many examples in the UK of low-bidders that have simply walked away from such "enterprises" and handed them back to the state.

/Today's/ news: privatised prison has holes in fences, inmates have balaclavas and wirecutters(!), alarms don't work. Employment training consisted of colouring in cartoons of Peppa Pig. So many drugs that a prison /officer/ passed out from the fumes!

He claims to be a billionaire, but none of the journalists who concoct lists of rich people think that he is actually as rich as he likes to claim.

The one consistent thing about Trump is that he lies to make himself look good, and he certainly lies about how wealthy he is.

He did inherit about $200 million dollars from his father, which did give him a flying start.

, hence many are wrong. We're told as children to put experts on pedestals, and many are unable to see past that.

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ght to be experts.

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NT gets worried when people disagree with him. The idea that he might be wr ong doesn't enter his mind, so they have to be wrong. If they are experts a nd disagree with him, it's because they aren't as expert as they are painte d.

Krw suffers from much the same problem, but has it in a slightly more advan ced form. Anything krw "knows" not only has to be right but also has to be universally known to be right, so that anybody who disagrees with him isn't just wrong, but also deliberately lying, merely to get up his nose.

There is a point to it, but one which NT doesn't want to recognise.

Less than half of our product designs turn out to be profitable. I read somewhere that 19 out of 20 breakfast cereal introductions are failures. One insulation against bankrupcy is to hedge your bets with lots of other bets.

So, design lots of stuff.

Another strategy is to design less stuff, but design it better, and for a better researched market.

Your strategy sounds rather like the rural marksman who painted the targets around the bullet-hole (for those bullets that had hit anything).

I have to accept he'll never grow up.

NT

The jury is still out on graphene and its analogues.

No doubt they would have railed against the waste of money on lasers when no-one would ever be able to afford a pencil sized perfect ruby crystal and massive flashlights had they been around at the time.

The big problem with blue sky research is that you can never tell in advance which things will later prove to be very important.

There is no doubt that the UK government is lousy at picking industrial winners or patenting major academic inventions. They gave away radar, the jet engine and more recently monoclonal antibodies (the latter if it had been patented would easily have funded UK scientific research).

The place where things usually go awry is in the seedcorn stage going from a small startup to the first step on the global ladder. In the UK increasingly startups get bought up by global players to refund the initial investors with a quick profit before they can fully fledge. The profits then all go offshore - ARM holdings got done over last year by the weakened pound and London putting short term profit above long term investor gain and SOftBank now own them.

You like to believe that because it fits with your ignorant prejudice against knowledge and skills. The problem in the UK is that government is run by and for London and the South East - it has been government policy to maintain a huge north south divide in prosperity and jobs. That in part explains why the Brexit vote happened the way it did.

The irony being that the places that voted to leave were net beneficiaries of EU policy to help struggling economic regions.

Plenty of electronics stuff doesn't and without software based simulations of modern electronic chip designs they would be almost impossible to fabricate with anything like acceptable yields.

Or, looking at it from a more grown-up point of view, NT is learning to reconcile himself to the fact that some people don't agree with him, even when he is perfectly convinced that he is correct (which does seem to happen remarkably often).

Many of us believe it because we see over and over again the state of people practising in fields where we ourselves are experts. Standards in commerce are too often terrible.

The main problem imho is a culture of valuing stupidity. As an example it's hard to find reasonable retail salespeople here, it's nearly always just brainless bull and near zero understanding of the products being sold.

I have encountered products that didn't do the job, but not very often. They normally get withdrawn from sale pretty quickly as the high level of returns make them instant lossmakers.

NT