This is an insight I’d had in a more abstract way before. As Zvi puts it in Zeroing Out:
It is much, much easier to pick out a way in which a system is sub-optimal, than it is to implement or run that system at anything like its current level of optimization.
A corollary of this:
It is much, much easier to find a bias in a complex model, than it is to build an equally good model.
Nonetheless, I didn’t truly grok it until reading this post.
Sometimes I notice that a system is biased or flawed, and I think in part due to reading this post I am not likely to then think “And now I know better”, but in fact I will realize that my thinking on this topic has only just begun. Once I discover I am not able to rely on others to do my thinking on a subject, I realize I will have to do it myself, from scratch. This is a large and difficult undertaking. Far harder than noticing the initial mistake in others.
Another way of saying it is just that “Just because I know one answer is wrong, does not mean I know which answer is right.” Yet another would be “Reversed stupidity is not intelligence”. I guess we all have to learn the basics. Still, this post helped me learn this lesson quite a bit.
This is an insight I’d had in a more abstract way before. As Zvi puts it in Zeroing Out:
Nonetheless, I didn’t truly grok it until reading this post.
Sometimes I notice that a system is biased or flawed, and I think in part due to reading this post I am not likely to then think “And now I know better”, but in fact I will realize that my thinking on this topic has only just begun. Once I discover I am not able to rely on others to do my thinking on a subject, I realize I will have to do it myself, from scratch. This is a large and difficult undertaking. Far harder than noticing the initial mistake in others.
Another way of saying it is just that “Just because I know one answer is wrong, does not mean I know which answer is right.” Yet another would be “Reversed stupidity is not intelligence”. I guess we all have to learn the basics. Still, this post helped me learn this lesson quite a bit.