How to spot real expertise

April 23, 2024

Thanks go to Travis (from the Clearer Thinking team) for coauthoring this with me. This is a cross-post from Clearer Thinking. How can you tell who is a valid expert, and who is full of B.S.? On almost any topic of importance you can find a mix of valid experts (who are giving you reliable information) and false but confident-seeming "experts" (who are giving you misinformation). To make matters even more confusing, sometimes the fake experts even have very impressive credentials, and ev...

I’m an extreme non-credentialist – what about you?

February 28, 2024

I'm an extreme (>99th percentile) non-credentialist. Does that mean if I find out someone has a nutrition Ph.D., then I don't think they know more about nutrition than most random people? Of course not. Credentials are evidence of what someone knows (e.g., having a nutrition Ph.D. is evidence that you have nutrition knowledge). But part of what makes me an extreme non-credentialist is that if I spend an hour watching someone with a nutrition Ph.D. debate a completely self-taught person, a...

The “seven realms of truth” framework

March 25, 2019

Here’s a framework I use to think more clearly about complex debates and philosophical questions about whether something is “true,” “exists,” and is “real” (e.g., “is this painting art?”, “is everything subjective?” and “is morality real?”). I find that thinking in terms of this framework can make it easier to figure out what’s being claimed and to clarify what I myself believe. The framework divides things that are sometimes claimed to be “true,” or that we might say “exist,” into seven dif...