Tetlock and the Taliban An Essay by Richard Hanania richardhanania.substack.com How a humiliating military loss proves that so much of our so-called "expertise" is fake, and the case against specialization and intellectual diversity. The lesson of Tetlock (and the Afghanistan War), is that while you certainly shouldn’t be getting all your information from your uncle’s Facebook Wall, there is no reason to start with a strong prior that people with medical degrees know more than any intelligent person who honestly looks at the available data. What excellence is experienceacademiaexpertise
The Web is Industrialized and I Helped Industrialize It An Article by Dave Rupert daverupert.com In our cultural obsession with billionaire entrepreneurs we laud new features more than the maintenance and incrementalism work of making old features better and more accessible. Maintenance looks like red minus signs in the spreadsheet. New features look like green plus signs. New features look better on our LinkedIn profiles. New features have that pizzazz, baby. When gardening, the building of planters and initial planting is a very short process. The majority of your time is spent nurturing and monitoring growth. I personally feel the struggle between maintainer work and new shiny feature work. I enjoy that new feature smell but I know that my day-to-day is more like a janitor on a boat mopping up someone else’s barf. In terms of metaphors, the gardening metaphor is certainly better, and it acknowledges that design and development still tend to be more creative endeavors. featuresnoveltywww