A bunch of things in this post seem wrong, or like non sequitors, or like they’re smushing different concepts together in weird ways.
It keeps flipping back and forth between criticizing people for thinking that no one was fooled, and criticizing people for thinking that some people were fooled. It highlights that savviness is distinct from corruptness or support for the regime, but apparently its main point was that the savvy are collaborating with the regime.
As I understand it, the main point of Scott’s Bounded Distrust post is that if you care about object-level things like whether taxes are increasing, whether wearing a mask reduces your risk of getting covid, whether the harvest will be good, or whether Russia will invade Ukraine, then you can extract some information from what’s said by authorities/institutions like Fox News, the New York Times, the CDC, Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin, etc., even though they often present distorted pictures of the world, as long as you’re savvy enough about understanding how they communicate and interpreting what they say.
This post categorizes everyone into dissidents and supporters of “the regime” and somehow stuffs savviness in there and says things that don’t map onto the concept of savviness or the examples of savviness that come to mind.
As I understand it, Scott’s post was making basically the same conceptual distinction as this Andrew Gelman post, where Gelman writes:
One of the big findings of baseball statistics guru Bill James is that minor-league statistics, when correctly adjusted, predict major-league performance. James is working through a three-step process: (1) naive trust in minor league stats, (2) a recognition that raw minor league stats are misleading, (3) a statistical adjustment process, by which you realize that there really is a lot of information there, if you know how to use it.
Scott labels the first two of Gelman’s categories “clueless” and the third “savvy”.
A bunch of things in this post seem wrong, or like non sequitors, or like they’re smushing different concepts together in weird ways.
It keeps flipping back and forth between criticizing people for thinking that no one was fooled, and criticizing people for thinking that some people were fooled. It highlights that savviness is distinct from corruptness or support for the regime, but apparently its main point was that the savvy are collaborating with the regime.
As I understand it, the main point of Scott’s Bounded Distrust post is that if you care about object-level things like whether taxes are increasing, whether wearing a mask reduces your risk of getting covid, whether the harvest will be good, or whether Russia will invade Ukraine, then you can extract some information from what’s said by authorities/institutions like Fox News, the New York Times, the CDC, Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin, etc., even though they often present distorted pictures of the world, as long as you’re savvy enough about understanding how they communicate and interpreting what they say.
This post categorizes everyone into dissidents and supporters of “the regime” and somehow stuffs savviness in there and says things that don’t map onto the concept of savviness or the examples of savviness that come to mind.
As I understand it, Scott’s post was making basically the same conceptual distinction as this Andrew Gelman post, where Gelman writes:
Scott labels the first two of Gelman’s categories “clueless” and the third “savvy”.