Book: 20240326 to 20241227, "The Death of Expertise" by Tom Nichols

20240326 - Introduction: The death of expertise

TV, Internet and search engine make things much worse.

Can AI save us?

From the other side, it's harder to trust experts regarding social issues now.

20240611 - Experts and citizens

"But after all, you can become an expert reading a book a month, right?" Wrong. p38

It's more about time. A real expert may have spent 4+ years in University on some specific profession, and 10+ years after that. If it's 2 hours everyday for learning and practice, then it's 14*365*2=10220 hours.

One hour per day reading a book, means 30 hours per month. Normally we will spend less than 6 month in one specific domain, which is 180 hours. That's nothing.

However, most of the experts don't have cross-domain knowledge. So I may know more about biology than physicist. And, we have fallacies. In the latter case, only real experts can beat normal experts.

20240820 - How conversation became exhausting

1. Topics are always in grey area. Not black or white.

2. Ego is too heavy. We can always find something to support our opinion.

3. Most likely, no concept can be explained in a few words.

Conclusion: in most cases, it's not worth arguing any topic with other people.

Our time is precious. Arguing is waste of time.

20241108 - Higher education : the customer is always right

What's the root cause of those childish college students, and what's the solution?

People refuse to accept the rule of nature: competition is cruel, and most of people are not suppose to win big. We can either help the whole of people, or individuals, but not both. Most of people suppose to be layperson.

Study is hard. It is painful. Not everyone want to take it.

What's the realistic solution? Large scale war?

20241111 - Let me google that for you : how unlimited information is making us dumber

Can AI solve the misinformation problem? They should help a lot, after removing illusions.

Different AI have different bias, but we can mitigate that by checking more than one AI. Some AI, such as Grok, should be pretty good.

AI will follow the first principle in reasoning. That means it needs Robots to do millions of experiments to confirm the theories.

The Community Notes on X platform works well. Maybe that's the ultimate solution.

20241203 - The "new" new journalism, and lots of it

Most of meaningful events and news are complicated.
Most of people are lazy. They are driven by dopamine and pleasure. After half century of training from TV, Radio and Internet, they have lost the capability of critical thinking.

Journalists have to adapt to this new situation.

We can encourage everyone to read or meditate, but surely they are not likely to follow.

How to solve this problem? What role will AI play here?

20241227 - When the experts are wrong

When experts are right, no one would notice it.

And experts cannot be right all the time.

That's the problem.

No one want to spend a lot of time to understand complicated things, and they imagine the things are actually not that hard. That's completely wrong. Most of things are quite hard.

Because they believe things are simple, they would happily blame others(especially experts and government) when things go wrong.

When will people spend time read and study?

This is hopeless. Most of experts don't spend time read about other domains.

20241227 - Conclusion: Experts and democracy

Equality is only about law, but nothing else. We are all equal in front of law.

This includes voting, but not include our opinion.

When will most of people realize this?

The root cause could be laziness.

People don't want to take their own responsibility. They want to give the rights to government, let the government to do the work for them.

If government screwed it, they can vote for another party to replace the current one.

There is no free lunch, however.