How to spot real expertise

April 23, 2024

Thanks go to Travis (from the Clearer Thinking team) for coauthoring this with me. This is a cross-post from Clearer Thinking. How can you tell who is a valid expert, and who is full of B.S.? On almost any topic of importance you can find a mix of valid experts (who are giving you reliable information) and false but confident-seeming "experts" (who are giving you misinformation). To make matters even more confusing, sometimes the fake experts even have very impressive credentials, and ev...

These epistemic methods really want you to trust them

November 26, 2020

These epistemic methods really want you to trust them. Each tries to prove itself to you: 1. Tautologies are true by definition, 'cause tautologies are true by definition. 😎 2. Induction worked in the past, so it probably will in the future. 😉 3. If deduction solves your problem, and you want it solved, then you'll want to use deduction! 😊 4. If you thought Bayesianism had 3:1 odds, and you think this sentence is 2x more likely if Bayesianism than if not Bayesianism, ...

Idea-Inducing Questions

August 2, 2020

Struggling to come up with an idea for a blog post? Want to post ideas on social media but can't think of what to write about? Want to come up with interesting topics for an intellectual discussion or meetup? Use my lists of "Idea-Inducing Questions" to generate nearly endless ideas to write about, think about, or discuss! Questions about learning and truth-seeking • Recently learned: what's a powerful idea, concept, or mental model that you've been learning about recently that you...