Comments on: The Transmission of Knowledge

By: rob

rob — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 21:23:55 +0000

this may be too far out there, but given how easy it is to access information these days, there is almost no reason to be wrong about these things. on most subjects there is almost no need to say ‘i think….’. all you need to do is type it into the google. for example, just google ‘does caffeine dehydrate’ and you’ll have your answer (as long as you’re not looking at a questionable info source).

hey, we all come to believe things that are not true. but when my father tells me that he thinks marty schottenheimer was a solid playoff coach, all we need to do is look at his playoff record and, voila, we no longer have to think.

this means that ‘expert opinion’ is less and less important. unless the subject matter is really complicated, many answers are out there for us if we only look. so while expertise is of course something to strive for, expertise when applied to an unsolved problem is worth listening to. ‘expertise’ around known things is just noise.

By: Josh

Josh — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:05:56 +0000

“How does the conventional wisdom get things so wrong, and how can we combat this?”

I might be wrong on this, but when John Kenneth Galbraith coined the phrase “conventional wisdom” wasn’t it to highlight how little of the wisdom was actually true?

By: Ken Houghton

Ken Houghton — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:41:23 +0000

In that context, a quote from ESPN’s article on the latest pigeon-tempter to go up at County Stadium (http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=4897641):

“Selig headed a group that bought the Seattle Pilots in bankruptcy court in 1970, moved the franchise to Milwaukee and renamed it the Brewers.”

Isn’t this what the RIM chairman tried to do with the Glendale Coyotes?