EDIT: On a re-read, I may have misunderstood a key line. I translated “Most people have no hope of understanding complex topics” as “Most people can’t understand complex topics”, whereas you could have intended “Most people do not hope/believe that they can understand complex topics” while leaving the question of whether this is a correct viewpoint unanswered. I’m leaving what I wrote as-is, but flagging that it might have been (confirmed with author: I misunderstood) a response to a misunderstanding on my part.
This post generates in me a strong urge to write a counterpoint post. Sorry this is long.
You start by saying, basically, most people find the world complicated and confusing and don’t expect to understand things. The repeated use of “most people” without providing evidence that these are attributes that plausibly do apply to most people raises a red flag for me, it pattern matches to “most people are dumb”, but let’s let that pass, and assume you’re right that most people are confused by the world much of the time, and don’t feel like coming to greater understanding is a thing they could do. That may be true, seems plausible. But then you say this:
Most people have no hope of understanding complex topics.
No. Strongly disagree. “Most people don’t understand X” is a thing I could accept, and “most people feel like they can’t understand X, for many Xes” seems like it could be true, but “most people can’t understand X” is usually false, with only rare exceptions. Things are complex, yes, but complex on the level of “it takes some study to get the basics, but people of average intelligence could do it if they chose to” not “this is an eldritch deity unto you, you are not a high-IQ priest, abandon all hope of understanding it”.
I think there may be an important difference between how you’re modeling getting to the point of “I understand this topic”, and how I model getting to that point. And that became clear right near the line above, where you said:
Thus, for them, experts are not people to whom we conveniently defer in order to save time. It’s not like they think they could read the state of the art of a field (most have never heard “SOTA”!) and build their own justified opinion.
You seem to be thinking of “I understand this topic” as equivalent to “I have reached the state of the art in this topic”, and presenting an implicit dichotomy between “I think I can get to a state of the art understanding on this topic” and “I have no clue, this topic is indistinguishable from magic for me”. Whereas I think there’s a lot of middle ground, and reaching the state of the art is not required to have useful understanding that turns a topic from eldritch mystery to “I understand basically how this works, it doesn’t seem mysterious, there are some topics around the edges of our knowledge that are still being researched, but the basics that everyone agrees on, or the major schools of thought, are ______”. And once you reach that point, people will (in my experience) start treating you like some kind of expert even though you are most definitely not. But you will be in a middle ground, where you can explain to people with basically 0 knowledge on a topic what some of the experts are saying.
As an example, let’s take computer science. It may feel mysterious to most people why, when they touch a spot on their screen, the phone does a thing and things change. But, this is not a mystery that is beyond the ken of your average person. Within a finite and manageable number of hours, I could explain from the ground up some basic things like what Boolean logic is, what a logic gate is, show someone some assembly language code and get them to agree that yes it’s plausible the assembly language is made of the logic components we discussed earlier, show them a higher-level programming language and get them to agree that yes, a few things like a conditional or a for loop can be implemented in the assembly language, and then show them a function that connects to a touch event… and then they understand how when they press a button their phone does a thing. They’re not at the forefront of human knowledge in computer science by any stretch, but it’s no longer mysterious.
Or let’s take the economy. It seems mysterious to many. But it’s not actually mysterious in the way unanswered questions in physics are. Some parts of it, like stock market prices, are anti-inductive, but the concept of something that is anti-inductive can be explained fairly easily, and with a few university classes (undergrad, doesn’t require exceptional intelligence or talent, just a few months of effort) you can understand the fundamentals of how the economy works. Yes, economists are tinkering around the edges and expanding our knowledge, but all you have to do is listen to this song, and then figure out what each line means, and you’ve got the basics: Fear the Boom and Bust: Keynes vs. Hayek—The Original Economics Rap Battle!
Which is like, a lot to ask of someone who’s got a busy life, but definitely not cosmic-horror impossible. Because this seemed like something lots of people found mysterious, I wrote a thing to point friends to which explained it in layperson terms. Myron’s Musings : The Economy. It’s not the best, but it’s an OK starting point where I can say to a friend “go read this thing I wrote and then we can chat and you’ll get the economy better than you do now”.
Or housing, which is a subcase of governance more generally and the insights generalize: Trying to make it so that the broad forces that have changed things so it’s harder to build now than it used to be are different, is a bit beyond the average person’s circle of control. But “and so I give up and rot” is the wrong response. If you want your town or city to build more housing, that is a thing you can make happen. Because your city council is just a few people, the city plan and zoning regulations are things you can read and understand, documents created by humans who had ideas of what a good document on this topic would look like, and you can talk to the current custodian of that document about what a better version would be. Or you can like, look on the city’s website, see when the meetings about building things are happening, and go to them, because they’re typically open to the public. You will quickly find the people at those meetings are just regular people, not priests with special knowledge. But at the same time, approximately nobody does this, and so if you do it you’ll be at the rarefied heights of expertise relative to most people, even though you haven’t done anything that’s actually intellectually challenging.
We can change this.
This requires a lot of work. The work needed is comparable in scope to the Scientific Revolution, the era of the Enlightenment, or the rise of Formalism.
We will need to transcend our superstitious understanding of the Modern Eldritch Deities. We will need to build a mechanistic understanding of politics, governance, morals and collective action.
Let’s get there step by step. And the first step to defeating the enemy is to name it.
If we don’t do this, we’re condemned to getting screw over by it, never understanding what is happening to us.
I don’t actually think the change that’s required here is comparable in scope to the scientific revolution. it’s a change in attitude, from “the world is confusing, and I can’t understand it or do anything about it”, to “the world is currently confusing to me in some ways, but is made of understandable parts, and I can understand them if I try, and then push on metaphorical levers that will make changes”. And luckily, it has never been easier to learn about complex topics. Back when I took my econ courses, you pretty much had to go sit in a classroom and pay thousands to tens of thousands of dollars to get that knowledge, but now many places put online courseware out there for free or very cheap.
Why I was motivated to write this big long thing (again, apologies), is because of the “most people have no hope of understanding complex topics” line. That understanding of the possibilities open to most people is threaded through the rest of the post, and if it’s correct, then I would think the we can change this line is probably false. Either people have a hope of understanding the world around them, and we should communicate that fact to them, or they don’t, and I guess they’re doomed.
Most people have no hope of understanding complex topics.
No. Strongly disagree. “Most people don’t understand X” is a thing I could accept, but “most people can’t understand X” is usually false, with only rare exceptions.
You are confusing “Most people can’t understand X.” with “Most people have no hope of understanding X.”. Only the latter matter for the psychological toll it has on people.
Hopelessness might be warranted or not, but it’s there.
---
Separately, I believe that quite often, their hopelessness is warranted.
Everyone hits their ceilings.
I know many mathematically talented people who struggle to express themselves in ways that are legible to others, or to move their body in a natural way. They will get better if they train, but it’s pretty clear to them and everyone else that their ceiling is low.
In general, I know many people talented [at a field] with clear limitations in [some other field]. Arts, maths, oral expression, style, empathy, physical strength, body awareness, and so on.
Over time, they learn to acknowledge their talents and their limitations.
Oops—I realized you may have intended a different meaning than I assumed, on a re-read.
Separately, my experience has been that many people think they can’t understand things when they can. The sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in a world that’s too complicated for them is out of proportion to how complicated the world actually is. I’m thinking of a specific example of a good friend of mine who is clearly smart enough she could do lots of things, and made a point of telling me in the recent past that my willingness to go out and try and do things was inspiring to her, and she asked if I thought she might be able to do similarly, and I was like “obviously yes, there is no actual barrier stopping you, anything I’ve done that you’re pointing at, you also could have done, possibly better than I did”.
I don’t think the powerlessness many people feel in the face of complexity is a result of them hitting an intellectual capacity ceiling after trying to understand a complex topic, recognizing they’ve hit their ceiling, and stopping. I think it’s often a case of thinking “this is too complicated for me” and not even trying. My best guess (just a guess) is that many people do feel like only people who are smarter than them can do certain things (like making laws, understanding computers, understanding what makes the economy go), when this isn’t actually true. Our society does seem to inculcate in its members the idea that certain things are only for super-smart people to do, and whoever you are, you are not smart enough to do an impactful thing. I also suspect this may be load-bearing, in that if everyone who could tried to push things in the direction they thought they should go instead of saying “that’s beyond my ability”, we’d have a more chaotic world.
I think regardless of the details the statement in its strongest form is true of virtually everyone. Maybe anyone, if they just applied themselves, could work hard their whole life and achieve mastery of one topic. Let’s concede that.
That still leaves all of the other topics that are equally relevant to their lives and have no hope to have enough time to also understand before they die. I understand a lot about science and computers, and I’m even decently polymath-y enough to get a bit of stuff like biology, medicine, law. But I’m still dependent on the “priesthoods” of those fields; a mediocre lawyer knows far more law than I do. And it’s simply not economical nor, ultimately, possible for me to achieve a comparable level of understanding at everything I’d need to to be able to look at the world and say “ah, yes, I get it now, I see how the cogs tick”.
People and society are largely well calibrated. People who are deemed (by themselves or society) to be bad at maths, at sports, at arts, etc. are usually bad at them.
People and society are not perfectly calibrated.
People are sometimes under-confident in their abilities. This is often downstream of them lacking confidence.
People are sometimes over-confident in their abilities. This is often downstream of them being too confident.
Our society does seem to inculcate in its members the idea that certain things are only for super-smart people to do, and whoever you are, you are not smart enough to do an impactful thing.
Most people would fail at passing the bar and the USMLE. This is why most people do not attempt them, and this is why our society tells them not to.
I believe it is load bearing, but in the straightforward way: it would be catastrophic if everyone tried to study things far beyond their abilities and wasted their time.
Clarification: my position is that our current level of understanding of how the economy works can, for the most part, be grasped by most people with some effort, rather than being an impenetrable mystery. Not that everyone actually does understand the economy because it’s super easy, and certainly not that if they did we wouldn’t have economic problems. None of what I said is incompatible with what you said.
It would be nice if understanding how things worked automatically led to things working better, but this is not the case.
A simple example where understanding an underlying problem doesn’t solve the problem: I understand fairly well why I’m tempted to eat too many potato chips, and why this is bad for me, and what I could do instead. And yet, sometimes I still eat more potato chips than I intend.
A more complicated case: a few people making a lot of money, while most people’s lives get better due to specialization and trade (counting the world economy as a whole, not necessarily within a particular village, or country) is what one would predict given an understanding of how the economy works. There are of course many complications in the real world that aren’t captured in economic models, which often make simplifying assumptions like “people are rational”. In the real world, people do things like eat potato chips a nonzero number of times.
A simple example where understanding an underlying problem doesn’t solve the problem: I understand fairly well why I’m tempted to eat too many potato chips, and why this is bad for me, and what I could do instead. And yet, sometimes I still eat more potato chips than I intend.
This is a great example.
Some people, specifically thanks to their better understanding of themselves, do not find themselves eating more potato chips than they intend.
EDIT: On a re-read, I may have misunderstood a key line. I translated “Most people have no hope of understanding complex topics” as “Most people can’t understand complex topics”, whereas you could have intended “Most people do not hope/believe that they can understand complex topics” while leaving the question of whether this is a correct viewpoint unanswered. I’m leaving what I wrote as-is, but flagging that it
might have been(confirmed with author: I misunderstood) a response to a misunderstanding on my part.This post generates in me a strong urge to write a counterpoint post. Sorry this is long.
You start by saying, basically, most people find the world complicated and confusing and don’t expect to understand things. The repeated use of “most people” without providing evidence that these are attributes that plausibly do apply to most people raises a red flag for me, it pattern matches to “most people are dumb”, but let’s let that pass, and assume you’re right that most people are confused by the world much of the time, and don’t feel like coming to greater understanding is a thing they could do. That may be true, seems plausible. But then you say this:
No. Strongly disagree. “Most people don’t understand X” is a thing I could accept, and “most people feel like they can’t understand X, for many Xes” seems like it could be true, but “most people can’t understand X” is usually false, with only rare exceptions. Things are complex, yes, but complex on the level of “it takes some study to get the basics, but people of average intelligence could do it if they chose to” not “this is an eldritch deity unto you, you are not a high-IQ priest, abandon all hope of understanding it”.
I think there may be an important difference between how you’re modeling getting to the point of “I understand this topic”, and how I model getting to that point. And that became clear right near the line above, where you said:
You seem to be thinking of “I understand this topic” as equivalent to “I have reached the state of the art in this topic”, and presenting an implicit dichotomy between “I think I can get to a state of the art understanding on this topic” and “I have no clue, this topic is indistinguishable from magic for me”. Whereas I think there’s a lot of middle ground, and reaching the state of the art is not required to have useful understanding that turns a topic from eldritch mystery to “I understand basically how this works, it doesn’t seem mysterious, there are some topics around the edges of our knowledge that are still being researched, but the basics that everyone agrees on, or the major schools of thought, are ______”. And once you reach that point, people will (in my experience) start treating you like some kind of expert even though you are most definitely not. But you will be in a middle ground, where you can explain to people with basically 0 knowledge on a topic what some of the experts are saying.
As an example, let’s take computer science. It may feel mysterious to most people why, when they touch a spot on their screen, the phone does a thing and things change. But, this is not a mystery that is beyond the ken of your average person. Within a finite and manageable number of hours, I could explain from the ground up some basic things like what Boolean logic is, what a logic gate is, show someone some assembly language code and get them to agree that yes it’s plausible the assembly language is made of the logic components we discussed earlier, show them a higher-level programming language and get them to agree that yes, a few things like a conditional or a for loop can be implemented in the assembly language, and then show them a function that connects to a touch event… and then they understand how when they press a button their phone does a thing. They’re not at the forefront of human knowledge in computer science by any stretch, but it’s no longer mysterious.
Or let’s take the economy. It seems mysterious to many. But it’s not actually mysterious in the way unanswered questions in physics are. Some parts of it, like stock market prices, are anti-inductive, but the concept of something that is anti-inductive can be explained fairly easily, and with a few university classes (undergrad, doesn’t require exceptional intelligence or talent, just a few months of effort) you can understand the fundamentals of how the economy works. Yes, economists are tinkering around the edges and expanding our knowledge, but all you have to do is listen to this song, and then figure out what each line means, and you’ve got the basics: Fear the Boom and Bust: Keynes vs. Hayek—The Original Economics Rap Battle!
Which is like, a lot to ask of someone who’s got a busy life, but definitely not cosmic-horror impossible. Because this seemed like something lots of people found mysterious, I wrote a thing to point friends to which explained it in layperson terms. Myron’s Musings : The Economy. It’s not the best, but it’s an OK starting point where I can say to a friend “go read this thing I wrote and then we can chat and you’ll get the economy better than you do now”.
Or housing, which is a subcase of governance more generally and the insights generalize: Trying to make it so that the broad forces that have changed things so it’s harder to build now than it used to be are different, is a bit beyond the average person’s circle of control. But “and so I give up and rot” is the wrong response. If you want your town or city to build more housing, that is a thing you can make happen. Because your city council is just a few people, the city plan and zoning regulations are things you can read and understand, documents created by humans who had ideas of what a good document on this topic would look like, and you can talk to the current custodian of that document about what a better version would be. Or you can like, look on the city’s website, see when the meetings about building things are happening, and go to them, because they’re typically open to the public. You will quickly find the people at those meetings are just regular people, not priests with special knowledge. But at the same time, approximately nobody does this, and so if you do it you’ll be at the rarefied heights of expertise relative to most people, even though you haven’t done anything that’s actually intellectually challenging.
I don’t actually think the change that’s required here is comparable in scope to the scientific revolution. it’s a change in attitude, from “the world is confusing, and I can’t understand it or do anything about it”, to “the world is currently confusing to me in some ways, but is made of understandable parts, and I can understand them if I try, and then push on metaphorical levers that will make changes”. And luckily, it has never been easier to learn about complex topics. Back when I took my econ courses, you pretty much had to go sit in a classroom and pay thousands to tens of thousands of dollars to get that knowledge, but now many places put online courseware out there for free or very cheap.
Why I was motivated to write this big long thing (again, apologies), is because of the “most people have no hope of understanding complex topics” line. That understanding of the possibilities open to most people is threaded through the rest of the post, and if it’s correct, then I would think the we can change this line is probably false. Either people have a hope of understanding the world around them, and we should communicate that fact to them, or they don’t, and I guess they’re doomed.
You are confusing “Most people can’t understand X.” with “Most people have no hope of understanding X.”. Only the latter matter for the psychological toll it has on people.
Hopelessness might be warranted or not, but it’s there.
---
Separately, I believe that quite often, their hopelessness is warranted.
Everyone hits their ceilings.
I know many mathematically talented people who struggle to express themselves in ways that are legible to others, or to move their body in a natural way. They will get better if they train, but it’s pretty clear to them and everyone else that their ceiling is low.
In general, I know many people talented [at a field] with clear limitations in [some other field]. Arts, maths, oral expression, style, empathy, physical strength, body awareness, and so on.
Over time, they learn to acknowledge their talents and their limitations.
Oops—I realized you may have intended a different meaning than I assumed, on a re-read.
Separately, my experience has been that many people think they can’t understand things when they can. The sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in a world that’s too complicated for them is out of proportion to how complicated the world actually is. I’m thinking of a specific example of a good friend of mine who is clearly smart enough she could do lots of things, and made a point of telling me in the recent past that my willingness to go out and try and do things was inspiring to her, and she asked if I thought she might be able to do similarly, and I was like “obviously yes, there is no actual barrier stopping you, anything I’ve done that you’re pointing at, you also could have done, possibly better than I did”.
I don’t think the powerlessness many people feel in the face of complexity is a result of them hitting an intellectual capacity ceiling after trying to understand a complex topic, recognizing they’ve hit their ceiling, and stopping. I think it’s often a case of thinking “this is too complicated for me” and not even trying. My best guess (just a guess) is that many people do feel like only people who are smarter than them can do certain things (like making laws, understanding computers, understanding what makes the economy go), when this isn’t actually true. Our society does seem to inculcate in its members the idea that certain things are only for super-smart people to do, and whoever you are, you are not smart enough to do an impactful thing. I also suspect this may be load-bearing, in that if everyone who could tried to push things in the direction they thought they should go instead of saying “that’s beyond my ability”, we’d have a more chaotic world.
I think regardless of the details the statement in its strongest form is true of virtually everyone. Maybe anyone, if they just applied themselves, could work hard their whole life and achieve mastery of one topic. Let’s concede that.
That still leaves all of the other topics that are equally relevant to their lives and have no hope to have enough time to also understand before they die. I understand a lot about science and computers, and I’m even decently polymath-y enough to get a bit of stuff like biology, medicine, law. But I’m still dependent on the “priesthoods” of those fields; a mediocre lawyer knows far more law than I do. And it’s simply not economical nor, ultimately, possible for me to achieve a comparable level of understanding at everything I’d need to to be able to look at the world and say “ah, yes, I get it now, I see how the cogs tick”.
I believe...
People and society are largely well calibrated. People who are deemed (by themselves or society) to be bad at maths, at sports, at arts, etc. are usually bad at them.
People and society are not perfectly calibrated.
People are sometimes under-confident in their abilities. This is often downstream of them lacking confidence.
People are sometimes over-confident in their abilities. This is often downstream of them being too confident.
Most people would fail at passing the bar and the USMLE. This is why most people do not attempt them, and this is why our society tells them not to.
I believe it is load bearing, but in the straightforward way: it would be catastrophic if everyone tried to study things far beyond their abilities and wasted their time.
If the economy is so easily understood then why do we have high inflation, a cost of living crisis, rising inequality?
The thing that is not understood is why these things are happening and how we can change things so that normal people are better off.
The fact that some people have some coherent theories for some aspects of the economy is not equivalent to us understanding the economy.
Clarification: my position is that our current level of understanding of how the economy works can, for the most part, be grasped by most people with some effort, rather than being an impenetrable mystery. Not that everyone actually does understand the economy because it’s super easy, and certainly not that if they did we wouldn’t have economic problems. None of what I said is incompatible with what you said.
It would be nice if understanding how things worked automatically led to things working better, but this is not the case.
A simple example where understanding an underlying problem doesn’t solve the problem: I understand fairly well why I’m tempted to eat too many potato chips, and why this is bad for me, and what I could do instead. And yet, sometimes I still eat more potato chips than I intend.
A more complicated case: a few people making a lot of money, while most people’s lives get better due to specialization and trade (counting the world economy as a whole, not necessarily within a particular village, or country) is what one would predict given an understanding of how the economy works. There are of course many complications in the real world that aren’t captured in economic models, which often make simplifying assumptions like “people are rational”. In the real world, people do things like eat potato chips a nonzero number of times.
This is a great example.
Some people, specifically thanks to their better understanding of themselves, do not find themselves eating more potato chips than they intend.
There is more.