From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Wed Aug 21 2002 - 09:33:55 MDT
On Wednesday, August 21, 2002, at 04:40 am, Samantha Atkins wrote:
> spike66 wrote:
>> Anders Sandberg wrote:
>>> ...I have noted that the quality of foreign policy ideas posted here
>>> generally tends to be notably low; while there are some quite advanced
>>> threads on science, people in general here does not seem to be well
>>> versed in political science, law or history...
>>>
>> I am glad someone of Anders' stature has stated this. The extropian
>> community has not displayed any particular wisdom in politics, but
>> unfortunately politics seems to have become the majority of our posts.
>> Let us acknowledge that we do not have access to the information
>
> Having access to information is not that hard. We have no idea what
> information heads of state have or don't have and how biased it is by
> their assitants and chain of command.
Sadly, I don't think this problem is limited to politics. I see the
same ignorance in the areas of science and technology. People who don't
know a subject read a few magazine articles and become self-proclaimed
experts. This list is full of wacky ideas and outrageous predictions.
There was a study a while back that found that people with no training
in an area tended to rate themselves as having much more expertise than
they really possessed. The more one learned about a topic, the lower
their self-rating became. It took many years of serious study in an
area to realize how much one didn't know. Reading mailing lists on the
internet, magazine articles and watching interviews on TV is about the
lowest form of education there is. How do we know what we don't know?
-- Harvey Newstrom, CISSP <www.HarveyNewstrom.com> Principal Security Consultant <www.Newstaff.com>
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