Group items tagged

.... elites are arguing from their class and demographic biases (a bias can be positive, to be clear), not from their expertise. That lowers the marginal value of expertise, at least given how our world operates. I recall earlier research blogged by Alex showing that if you are a French economist, your views are more influenced by being a French person than by being an economist.

"From the testers' point of view, they had loads of experience with sophisticated aircraft. They wanted clear rules, better safety protocols, and reasonable work expectations from the Project Wing managers. At the same time, some members of the flight-testing crew felt like their expertise on how to accomplish their mission was being dismissed, people told us. In contrast, some of the team's managers felt as if the crew's skills with combat aeroplanes and military drones made them somewhat overqualified and their ideas overkill for the task at hand, according to a person close to the company. It was a disconnect between two groups with very different mentalities about how to get things done."

"he Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps will also phase out their programs to train uniformed strategists and retire serving strategists, which will save billions of dollars, Mattis said. Meanwhile, civilian consultants will replace strategists across the Department of Defense. According to the contract, their key duties will include producing PowerPoint briefings with graphics that no one understands, writing white papers that will not be read by policymakers, faking expertise on countries they have never visited (primarily China and Russia), and repeatedly saying "whole of government," all at a much lower cost than what the Pentagon currently spends for similar duties."

"Our word for the science of elections is psephology. The word is quite new; it was coined in 1948 by the British historian R. B. McCallum, otherwise chiefly remembered for his aphoristic dictum for democracy-watchers: "Find immortality in the footnotes of others." One of McCallum's colleagues, David Butler, later remarked, "Actually I regret having launched the word. It implies there is some occult expertise about the subject.""

The systems we use to encode expertise tend to depend on relatively slow processes of collective computation and don't typically work as measures of an individual's actual extra-institutional networks or their ability to respond to novelty. Organizations and metrics tuned to slow and stable periods that favor efficiency and specialization tend to suppress generalists and improvisation.