They’re quick to call out bullshit and are excellent at coming up with innovative ideas. Unfortunately, they produce a whole lot of false positives; they’re pretty overconfident and wrong a great deal of the time.
Are they excellent at coming up with innovative ideas?
In the context of the framing you’re using here: On the one hand, yes of course they are. On the other hand, a stopped clock is excellent at being right twice a day. I have a bit of a hard time differentiating the two hands here.
I think maybe it comes down to what we mean by “excellent” and you get into that in your post. It just feels wrong on a fundamental level to me to call the process by which these ideas are arrived at as “excellent”...but I guess that’s what a dirty Assessor would say!
I wouldn’t read too much into my choice of word there.
It’s also important to point out that I was trying to have a model that assumed interestingness. The “disagreeables” I mention are the good ones, not the bad ones. The ones worth paying attention to I think are pretty decent here; really, that’s the one thing they have to justify paying attention to them.
I like this post a lot.
One thing I keep thinking about is this sentence:
Are they excellent at coming up with innovative ideas?
In the context of the framing you’re using here: On the one hand, yes of course they are. On the other hand, a stopped clock is excellent at being right twice a day. I have a bit of a hard time differentiating the two hands here.
I think maybe it comes down to what we mean by “excellent” and you get into that in your post. It just feels wrong on a fundamental level to me to call the process by which these ideas are arrived at as “excellent”...but I guess that’s what a dirty Assessor would say!
I wouldn’t read too much into my choice of word there.
It’s also important to point out that I was trying to have a model that assumed interestingness. The “disagreeables” I mention are the good ones, not the bad ones. The ones worth paying attention to I think are pretty decent here; really, that’s the one thing they have to justify paying attention to them.