Graphical comparison of effect of expertise on damage and damage reduction, release 1.2. vs. 1.1.5.

"Here’s an example of the sort of lesson you get. Kasporov recounted a phase in his career when he was so dominant and so experienced that young players tried the strategy of trying very unusual, little-studied variations, in the hope of neutralizing Kasporov’s experience. Turned out to be nearly always a bad move. Kasporov’s conclusion: those unusual variations were unusual and rare for a reason, they mostly suck. When a domain of practice has as long a history as chess does, you can be fairly sure that if some patterns don’t show up much, it’s more likely because people have concluded they don’t work, rather than people having missed innovation opportunities."

"Recently psychologists and experimental philosophers have reported findings showing that in some cases ordinary people’s moral intuitions are affected by factors of dubious relevance to the truth of the content of the intuition. Some defend the use of intuition as evidence in ethics by arguing that philosophers are the experts in this area, and philosophers’ moral intuitions are both different from those of ordinary people and more reliable. We conducted two experiments indicating that philosophers and non-philosophers do indeed sometimes have different moral intuitions, but challenging the notion that philosophers have better or more reliable intuitions. "

"Lovelock, who introduced the Gaia Hypothesis describing life on Earth as a vast self-regulating organism some 40 years ago, also stated that since 2000, warming had not happened as expected.

"The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," Lovelock told MSNBC.com in an interview.

While warming may not have reached Lovelock's expectations, it is clearly happening"

"By now it is becoming hard to remember that, at the peak of its popularity and influence, classical music carried with it an undeniable intellectual and even moral authority, qualities which would rub off on composers and performers such as Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Albert Schweitzer, Pierre Boulez, Van Cliburn and Igor Stravinsky, all of whom would, in different ways, play leading roles within the social and cultural landscape of the cold war period."

At least in part, we rely on a set of cues — titles, university degrees, papers published, lectures given — that have long been bound up in the concept of “expertise”. If a person is deemed an expert, we are more credulous of their claims, and their words carry more weight. But expertise is a fraught commodity — lashed inextricably to the commodities of privilege and power. Does an expert on poverty know more than someone who is poor? Are women given expert status on issues relating to women, but not others? Does expertise itself invest people with perverse incentives to maintain the status quo? How we ascribe expertise shapes whose voices and ideas have purchase in our discourse — whose books get published, whose writing fill op-ed column inches, who sits at what tables.

Behind the headlines of our time stands an unobtrusive army of science advisors. Panels of scientific, medical, and engineering experts evaluate the safety of the food we eat, the drugs we take, and the cars we drive. But despite the enormous influence of science advice, its authority is often problematic, and struggles over expert advice are thus a crucial aspect of contemporary politics. Science on Stage is a theoretically informed and empirically grounded study of the social process through which the credibility of expert advice is produced, challenged, and sustained.

self-taught. shoots in film (one of the last)
=> very organic approach to understanding all the diff bits of the craft... And it meant that absolutely everything I did was simply because I was passionate and wanted to try stuff. You’re never going to learn something as profoundly as when it’s purely out of curiosity.

"I think Murray and I are basically in agreement about the facts here. If you take narrow enough slices and focus on the media, academia, and civilian government, you can find groups of elites with liberal attitudes on economic and social issues. But I’m also interested in all those elites with conservative attitudes. Statistically, they outnumber the liberal elites. The conservative elites tend to live in different places than the liberal elites and they tend to have influence in different ways (consider, for example, decisions about where to build new highways, convention centers, etc., or pick your own examples), and those differences interest me." Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://andrewgelman.com/2012/02/some-reactions-to-charles-murrays-thoughts-on-income-and-politics

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2012/04/conference-on-public-intellectuals.html

The question we most need addressed is not what epistemic modals mean, but what to do with other people's.

The Tiffen Company is pleased to announce a global distribution partnership with Digital Film Tools, a developer of visual effects tools. Both companies hold impressive reputations and are among a small group to have a rich history that runs deep with creative and technical expertise, attaining the industry's highest accolades including Emmy's for both technical and artistic achievements. The new distribution arrangement provides the creative community access to an unprecedented technology.

"PCT suggests why expertise in a specific domain leads a person to resist a theory that would require a fundamental shift in the foundations of their thinking about that of which they know more than almost anyone else. Would an expert in the astrological effects of the interplay of third level epicycles of Saturn with the retrograde movement of Venus have taken kindly to a Newton telling him that no such epicycles exist? Tim Carey has told some of us that when he used the "Method of Levels" in psychotherapy in Scotland he reduced the waiting list from 15 months to zero, but when he left Scotland, the method was banned and potential practitioners told they would be fired if they used it. It might be informative to run MOL with those who determined it should be banned, might it not?
[...]
PCT has great breadth, and great accuracy and prediction power in the few areas where it has been stress-tested, but in most narrow well-studied areas the existing models provide at least as good predictive accuracy. Why should a person with years of specialized experience want to shift to a novel PCT base for thinking about the narrow topic?

Why should a student take the advice of some one versed in PCT over the advice of many people believed to be authorities on the student's area of interest?"

"Thinking about these communities reminded me of Lovecraft’s earlier interactions. In some ways, amateur journalism and epistolary circles of Lovecraft’s day were not unlike the blogs and webpages that Less Wrong and the chemtrailers use. (Yes, I know the dangers of cross-temporal and cross-technological comparisons.) Still, I think there is much to explore about how such groups produce and distribute their knowledge against the background of an epistemic status quo. If scientists have their journals—as Alex Csiszar has been exploring—the laity have their amateur journalism and their blogs. And such spaces give historians of science and technology and STS scholars a chance to examine and probe the practices of epistemic subcultures." Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://americanscience.blogspot.com/2012/04/lovecraft-science-and-epistemic.html