Sujato’s thought of the day: on experts

I guess from my perspective, I see commonly that people who are more generalists believe similar things about generalization. We’re seeing that a lot in the COVID era with people who truly believe that their own ordinary life experience and common sense are as good as medical science, often to tragic effect.

Ha! I dig it. Yes, my example was more ‘food for thought’ and was written in the 70s, and probably mostly applicable to the everyday grind of life.

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One of the problems of specialization I think is that if a person specializes in a narrow subject without much knowledge in other seemingly unrelated subjects, their understanding can be quite shallow because they don’t understand the bigger picture that subject fits into. So, for example, a person can spend an entire career studying a set of Buddhist texts, but if they don’t branch out into ancient history studies, they don’t understand the context those text existed in. Then they can misinterpret them or just not understand certain references and make up fanciful meanings for them. That goes for just about any religious tradition with ancient scriptures.

There are people called polymaths who specialize in multiple subjects and excel at noticing their interconnections in greater detail as a result, and I think they are more creative that ordinary specialists because of that. They see a much bigger web of reality and notice patterns that straddle different disciplines. It’s similar to the insights a multi-cultural person notices. A person exposed to different human cultures has a better grasp of what’s universal to human societies and what’s an artifact of a particular region’s history. Someone who only knows one culture easily mistakes the vagaries of their particular history as universal principles.

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Great points. Jordan Peterson explained how he liked finding insights and truths about human nature, which were cross-verified from other domains of knowledge. So if, for example, Buddhism, Christianity, and psychology, could all agree on the same nuanced point, it really said a lot for that nuanced point they all had in common.

Once in a while, in my Dhamma Talks, I’ll draw on some of this “cross-domain verification” from some of my other (mostly-overlapping Buddhist-compatible) favorite teachings from past teachers like Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, U.G. Krishnamurti, and Confucius. I’m also quite keen on Iain McGilchrist’s books about left and right brain hemispheres, and how the balance (or non-balance) of their usage affects behaviour.

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Sure! Mutual respect and humility is the order of the day.

Peterson is a delusional addict who put himself in a coma for 9 days and spent 10 months in silent rehab due to, among other dysfunctional nonsense, his insane beef-only diet. He is no expert, and his manosphere mysticism deserves only pity.

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Go ahead and ad-hominem him, but the “cross-domain verification” thing is something I’m glad he mentioned. I always innately felt that it was a good thing (when different domains arrive at the same truths), but he put a label on it that I wasn’t able to.

Thanks for the permission! But I don’t do that, and I didn’t.

An ad-hominem argument says the conclusion is false because the proponent is unreliable. I said no such thing. On the contrary, “cross-domain verification” is a normal part of gaining knowledge, and I don’t think learning is possible without it. But it’s hardly Peterson’s idea.

This is a thread about experts, and Peterson is a textbook example of a pseudo-expert, one whose views are not merely wrong but dangerous, to himself and others. His disordered thinking nearly killed him, and it could just as easily kill others. I know this because other people kindly told me, but I can’t assume that everyone reading this thread also knows it.

If anyone is unclear who Peterson is, here’s an article from a few years ago, before the aforementioned breakdown.

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Well, Dhammawheel refuses to implement the like/heart/upvote button on their posts. So what comes out is that who has the most stamina/ time/ effort/ posts/ debating skills gets to dominate a certain topic, regardless of whether the view is right or not. Sometimes when one agrees with the view, it’s a nice feeling to see right view wins. If one doesn’t, it’s a rethink, should I quit that forum?

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Bhante, I wonder if you could explain further as I don’t think I understand what you are saying properly. Are you suggesting that a good way to determine right view is to look for the view that most people agree with?

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A good way to determine right view is to read the suttas, learn from long standing, good practised monks, reason out the discussion and practise for one self to understand things as they really are.

My point above is more of the differences between the mode of operation of various Buddhist forums. I am assuming that there’s a bunch of readers who do or don’t contribute to the discussion but have right views and are happy to click the like button if they see right views. And that bunch of readers are the majority likers rather than a bunch with wrong views. And that bunch of readers also stick around more or less consistently. Thus the like/heart button acts as another social check to help prevent the discussion from going over the rails to wrong views.

In Dhammawheel, they might prefer to not assume such a bunch of right view readers exist, and prefer the “each voice is alone” model to discuss, thus, it depends on the power of the voices rather than the wisdom of the group to see which views dominate.

Theoretically speaking, both models has pros and cons. Current realistically speaking, I see more wrong views dominating in Dhammawheels.

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Ah right. Thank you Bhante. That makes more sense to me now. :anjal: Those assumptions are crucial. I think that in general, I am not as confident or optimistic of the ability of the ‘readers’ and their reasons to use a ‘like button’ as you.

I think that @NgXinZhao’s point is valid - that some forums use moderation and various tools to build useful communities. A single “like” button is perhaps overly simplistic, but the upvote/downvote and reputation level systems seem quite effective on technical forums. After all, in the context of this thread, a key way to identify experts is by reputation. Of course, this can be upsetting for non-experts who think that every opinion should carry equal weight (especially theirs…).

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He has a youtube video about the Buddha and its just…embarrassing…

Regarding anarchism and the internet. Well, probably the most anarchistic website online is 4chan…and we all know how that went down…

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One interesting discovery: US scientists found SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in deer blood samples from 2019.

Worryingly, it seems quite a lot of US deer had COVID antibodies from samples in 2020 and 2021. The virus has shown a lot of ability to infect other animals. What we don’t want is reservoirs of the virus evolving in other animal populations and then jumping back to humans in changed form at a later point.

I would not read much into the single sample from 2019 that was positive. A small percentage of false positives are inherent in such tests. There were 143 pre-2020 samples. One or two false positives would not be surprising. There was a mention also of this one sample being ‘at the minimum threshold of detection’. Most probable explanation was a false positive.

Various studies have agreed that jump point into humans could not have occurred all that much before the initial official cases. The genetic tree of the evolution of the virus can be tracked. All early variants were very similar, differing by no more than three or so mutations. From estimates on the rate of mutations, a timeline for the starting point can be gauged. Likely sometime around October or November of 2019. It was very likely circulating for some weeks or a month or two prior to the first official cases, but not much more than that.

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:slight_smile:

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Wow, they have a single word for that. Thanks!

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