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...

Why Do Some People Have Better Intuition?

October 5, 2020

Here’s what I think: intuition is mainly a set of patterns, evaluations, anticipations and predictions that we learn from experience. Intuition differs in effectiveness across people and tasks because: Focus: We have experience in different domains. One person spends their time cooking, another training in martial arts. Wideness: Most have experience in more than one domain, and there can be cross-domain synergies as well. Perhaps the martial artist cook has an advantage. Time: ...

50 “Laws” of Everything

July 6, 2020

Parkinson's Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. Gates' Law: Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years. Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity (or, ...