People have two main modes of doing tasks: now or never.

They often try to do tasks soon, but not today. Then a few months later they haven't done it. A small portion of those tasks get reprioritized and most get abandoned (a few remain on people's unrealistic todo lists year after year).

People are bad at scheduling things which are semi-urgent. They don't have to do it immediately, but they shouldn't put it off for months.

Semi-urgent is a really common category. Learning in general is semi-urgent. It's uncommon that you need to learn something right now. If you learn to read at age 7 or at age 7.25 (3 whole months later), it's not a big deal. If you learn a math concept a few months later, in the long run that doesn't matter. If you learn about WWII a few months later, it doesn't matter. But you don't want to put those things off forever, either. They are good to learn reasonably soon.

A major reason for now or never is short-term emotions. People have a spark of excitement or interest that quickly fades, so they have to do something now (or quite soon) or else they lose their motivation. They commonly lose their motivation when they sleep and get an emotional reset. There isn't a simple fix for this. People should stop basing their lives on short-term emotions. They should stop being whim worshipers, as Ayn Rand called it.

I have a partial solution to this problem. It's a way of specifying "soon" in more detail.

You do 80% of the things you plan to do "soon" within 1 week. Of the ones you don't do, you finish 80% of those within 1 more week (2 total). Of the ones you don't do, you finish 80% of those with 2 more weeks (4 total). If you still didn't do it, you can give up.

With this method, less than 1% of stuff won't get done. And each phase is reasonably easy. You're only trying to do 4 out of 5 things. You can have a significant failure rate (up to 1 in 5) and still succeed at the 80% target. And there are only 3 phases, and the maximum time you have to worry about something is under a month.

Even though it has a small number of lenient phases, this method gets 96% of things done within 2 weeks and 99.2% within 4 weeks.

What can go wrong? The biggest thing is you plan to do stuff you don't want to do. Then you still won't want to do it next week or the week after. If you're intentionally avoiding something, I haven't offered any advice to fix that. And if you primarily act based on short-term emotions which are gone in week 2, this method also doesn't address that. And I don't tell you when you should change your mind and purposely decide not to do stuff (other than letting you off the hook after the third phase, which should happen less than 1% of the time so it's not that big a deal).

Still, I think it offers some useful guidelines. It gives you ballparks of what should be happening if things are going right and you're acting reasonably. When you deviate from this method, you can use that as a signal that something is broken – you're trying to do something you don't want to do, or you're trying to do something that you were emotional about when you decided to do it and you're no longer emotional about it, or your scheduling is broken in some way (e.g. you plan to do way more things than you have time for).

People commonly have only a vague idea of when "soon" is, so they don't even know when things should be getting done or when they are failing. It helps to have some guidelines for "soon" to compare your behavior against, so you can see which things you did soon and which you didn't, instead of fooling yourself with moving goalposts.

It's hard to believe how badly run these things are. Crypto is full of scams, money laundering and crime. The main scam is ponzi schemes: the price keeps going up as long as more "investors" buy in, and whoever the last round of buyers are will lose a ton of money. Crypto is not seeing a significant amount of use as an actual replacement for dollars and credit cards.

Anyway all the crypto exchanges are run by total amateurs who, knowingly or not, routinely commit financial fraud. And some examples can bring home what that really means:

Crypto Exchange Says It Can't Repay $190 Million to Clients After Founder Dies With Only Password

That's bad. Like really, really bad. It never occurred to them to be like "What happens to the company if our founder-CEO gets hit by a bus?" That's a standard question for startups. And this is certainly not the first time crypto money has been lost because a password was lost due to someone's death or another reason. That is a well known potential disaster. So they should have had protections against the well known danger, and they didn't. So that's awful.

But it gets way worse if you actually read the article. It's the kind of stuff that's hard to make up and would seem unrealistic if you made it up. It's so ridiculous:

Canadian crypto exchange [...] unexpectedly died in India

So he didn't even get hit by a Canadian bus. He died over in a risker country. Traveling to a less safe place wasn't enough to get them to be more careful.

The exchange holds [...] totaling $147 million, according to the affidavit.

And they owe $190 million. So they'd already lost $43 million before the founder died.

died “due to complications with Crohn’s disease

Crohn's disease is a chronic condition. So he didn't get hit by a bus, he died to a problem he already knew he had.

Cotten left behind no business records.

And yet people trusted him with $190 million.

As CBC noted, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce froze $26 millions worth of QuadrigaCX’s assets in January 2018 “after finding irregularities with payment processing,” and a document from the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in 2018 concluded that “$67-million worth of transactions ended up improperly transferred into the personal account of Costodian Inc, the payment processor.”

They'd already had big problems with tens of millions of dollars a year earlier. It's not like everything seemed OK until this one disaster happened.

“This is a tough lesson learned,” Calgary customer Elvis Cavalic told CBC, adding that he had been unable to withdraw $15,000 in holdings in October 2018.

The end of the article has the coup de grace: customers couldn't actually get their money out months ago when the founder was still alive and the password wasn't lost. Cuz crypto is a mix of a joke and a scam. Stay the hell away.

On FI, someone keeps asking how to feel that one is overreaching. Shouldn't there be an emotion to tell you what's going on?

No. Emotions are software, developed by our culture (mostly thousands of years ago). It's kind of like: every minute, or when something notable happens, that software runs through a checklist of 5000 things. If one is going on, it runs through another checklist with more detailed stuff for that issue. The results of the software analysis is presented in a short summary which we call an "emotion".

Our emotion software doesn't know about all situations or issues. It knows about a lot of stuff but not everything. There aren't emotions for everything. There's no reason it'd have to cover everything. It's not complete. Even if people had ten times as many emotions it still wouldn't be complete.

If there was an emotion for everything, emotions would be useless. A summary has to condense information. Emotions are focused on areas our culture considers important. They're selective. They prioritize. They help direct our attention to what matters. If there were emotions for everything, they wouldn't be a summary anymore, and they wouldn't be worth paying attention to. You'd have to have a second layer of software that screens the emotions for the ones you consider important and ignores the rest. If you want information about everything, use your eyes and ears, they are better at doing that type of thing (you won't see infrared but eyes are much less about summarizing than emotions are, they are more about giving you a reasonably complete picture of what's in front of you).

The whole concept of expecting an automatic response or indication of a situation, whether emotional or not, doesn't make sense. You have that for many things but not all things. Such responses have to come from somewhere, they don't just exist automatically in all cases.

With that out of the way, the best indication of overreaching is hardness. When something feels hard, maybe you're overreaching. Feeling confused or overwhelmed are other relevant indicators. These aren't about overreaching but they have some overlap. They're in the right ballpark.

The feeling of hardness indicates inefficiency.

People are confused about hardness partly because there are two types. Hardness-A is an evaluation of the issue in general. Hardness-B is the feeling, it's about a person's experience. Hence people do hard things and say "it was easy for me". Touch typing is fairly hard. It takes practice. It's a skill you have to develop. But it's easy for me. I do it without thinking. It doesn't require conscious attention. I used to experience it as being difficult, but I don't now.

The same is true of walking. There was a time in my life when I couldn't walk and I had to learn how. Most ways of using leg muscles do not result in walking, they result in falling. Only some specific actions succeed as walking and staying balanced. And people have tried to write software to make a robot walk around and they've found that's difficult.

Speaking English is hard. There are thousands of words to learn, each with a spelling and a pronunciation and at least one definition. There are grammar rules and exceptions. There are different forms of words with similar but different meanings, e.g. "hammer", "hammered", "hammering", "hammers", "hammer-like". But once you get used to English enough, it can feel easy, intuitive and second-nature.

It's the same with chess. The better you get at chess, the better you can autopilot it and play without trying very hard. Chess players have a skill level they can play at when trying hard, and a separate, lower skill level they can play at when taking it easy. The skill level for taking it easy isn't usually far behind – a top player can easily beat a good player. In other words, trying hard doesn't make a big difference. A top 1% player when trying his best is still a top 2% player when not trying very hard. Trying hard at chess does make a big difference when playing serious tournament games against players of similar skill, but it wouldn't make any difference against most opponents.

Trying hard is a big effort for small results. That's an inefficient use of effort. 10% of the effort lets a chess player achieve 90% of his maximum skill. Then trying ten times harder only adds a one ninth increase in skill. It makes sense to try hard in a competition where only the best player wins and everyone is trying their best, but it usually doesn't make sense to do that in life in general. And all this applies to many other examples besides chess.

Trying hard means you're not autopiloting. You're using conscious attention, which is a limited resource. You're using focus and mental energy and creativity and that kind of stuff. And, in general, people can do that for around 2 or 3 hours per day. They can do more in the short term but it leads to burnout if they keep it up over time. (For knowledge workers, the 8 hour work day is a myth. For chess players, they focus longer when competing, but they don't compete on most days.)

Trying hard means working at the edge of your abilities with less margin for error. It means more mistakes are made. It means you're trying to do things that you don't know an easy way to do. It means trying to do things you can't do habitually, can't do while multitasking, can't do while not at your best.

Most of our life is automated. Our minds are complicated and do tons of stuff. Our consciousness is like a factory manager who can go around and inspect any one workstation at a time and make changes, but the work in the factory always keeps going everywhere else. Hard stuff is stuff that only the manager can do, there's no workstation to do it. Doing hard stuff means the manager is busy and can't go around inspecting and improving the workstations in the factory, nor creating new ones. Some people don't notice the loss because their manager (conscious mind) is usually mostly idle anyway, rather than going around checking for problems. If you have a lazy manager who wasn't going to do much anyway, then keeping him busy doesn't appear to have much downside. It's still bad though: a busy manager isn't going to reform. Keeping the manager distracted from the ongoing, unsolved problems is not how to change things so that he becomes a better manager.

In general in life, you need to figure out easy, repeatable, low-error ways to do things, then automate them (add them as workstations in your mental factory that can keep producing even when the manager isn't there). Adding more of those is how you get a lot done in life. Having your manager do any work himself is a huge loss of productivity. Your manager can do the work of, like, three workstations. Maybe even ten. He's really good at stuff compared to the automated processes (which you can think of like robots or low skilled workers). But in the long run, having your manager do the work of even a hundred workstations is a terrible deal. It makes way more sense for him to help set up thousands or millions of workstations. Much more will get done if he doesn't do it. (Also, remember, if the manager works more than three hours a day, that's overtime and he starts getting tired.)

Stuff feels hard when your manager has to do it instead of a workstation doing it. You don't know how to do it using only the sorts of cheap, plentiful mental resources that form automatic workstations.

People are confused because having their manager do something is a common step in workstation setup. First you figure out how to do something using conscious attention and maximum focus. If you can do it at all, that's a good step one. Then you figure out how to do it more easily and reliably. Then you get good at it to the point it's easy and automatic/intuitive/second-nature.

But doing something for the purpose of learning and setting up an automatic workstation, and doing it to get it done, are different things. The goal matters to how its done. Like, is the manager taking notes on how he does it so that he can then hand off the job to an unskilled worker later? Is he looking for what could be automated, as he goes along? Is he trying to figure out how to break down the task into small, simple parts that could be handled by dumb workers or robots? Doing those things helps work towards a day when the manager can stop being involved and delegate everything – which means he can move on to new projects.

On the other hand, sometimes people think they will only do something once, so they don't worry about any of that stuff, they just try to get it done and even getting the manager to do it a second time would be hard (they have no notes, they don't even know exactly what they did, they just fiddled with stuff until it worked and they lost track of some of their actions).

And sometimes people think automating something is too hard, so they won't bother. Right now, the easiest thing to do is get it done without worrying about the future. Figuring out how to automate stuff is extra work. Then they do the same thing again the next day, and the next, and they keep wasting manager effort and never get a workstation created. (This is more common with things that come up sporadically, e.g. every few weeks, but sometimes people do it with daily tasks.) Or sometimes people partially automate a task, e.g. typing, but they never fully automate it, it's always a bit of work and a bit distracting.

People talk about inspiration and perspiration. But it should be inspiration and automation. Instead of working hard, figure out how the great new idea can be done easily and repeatedly.

A big obstacle to automation is errors. Every time something goes wrong, the low skill workers or robots at the workstation can't do much troubleshooting. They aren't very creative. They'll go through a checklist of troubleshooting steps if their manager told them to (that's highly recommended!). If that doesn't work, then either the manager has to come along and fix things (like if a machine is broken), or else they can throw out that work product and start over (if only half of the things the workstation produces actually work, it can still produce stuff, although there better be some quality control steps to actually find the broken ones and get rid of them).

Automating requires figuring out how to do stuff in a highly reliable way with a low error rate. You have to figure out not just a method to accomplish a task, but an easy, reliable method that doesn't have many ways to fail. If every step is easy, and that are steps to check for problems and standard ways to fix them, then it can work pretty well and the manager doesn't have to be called in very often to clean up a mess. That's good if your goal is to get millions of workstations running, with just one manager, so that you can get a lot done in life. And yes millions is realistic.

Your brain is a computer. It's a more powerful computer than my iMac. My iMac can do around four billion CPU cycles per second, and each cycle can get several small tasks done. If the average workstation involves a million small tasks to complete one work product, and I have a million workstations, then they might all be able to average a work product completion every 10 seconds, while all running simultaneously. That's the ballpark of how powerful the brain is. And it's better to have a billion workstations and turn some on and off – some are general purpose, but most are only used when doing a specific kind of activity, e.g. a workstation that is only used when playing or thinking about chess. (Figuring out more general purpose workstations helps keep things manageable – it means you need fewer total workstations and you can get stuff done with fewer running at once. Thinking in a more principled way can mean a hundred million workstations, with a million on at a time, instead of a hundred billion workstations with ten million on at a time.)

People tell stories about themselves. This is uncontroversial.

Sometimes those stories contain errors. This is uncontroversial. People sometimes deny it when they want to deny that a particular claim in a particular story is an error.

Sometimes people's stories about themselves don't match their actions. This is uncontroversial in general. People sometimes deny it when they are defending a particular story.

When people's stories and actions don't match, a common reaction is not to notice. Why is that common? That sounds weird. It's because they already fixed the story/action mismatches that they do notice. The ones they are blind to are the ones that stay. The ones they rationalize are the ones that persist over time. The things that stay wrong over time have a higher rate of dishonesty than the ones that get fixed sooner. The issues you're honest about will get fixed with a varied, unbiased distribution of speeds – you figure some out soon and some later. The ones you're dishonest about will get get fixed with a skewed distribution of speeds – you generally don't figure them out, few get fixed because you're preventing fixing them.

When a story/action mismatch is pointed out to people, a common reaction is to blame the action. They claim it's weird they did that. The action strikes them as out of character. When story and reality clash, people tend to side with story, except in certain scientific contexts where a lot of effort has been put into getting people to respect reality more.

When story and action contradict, it's more often the story that's wrong. You can't act out of character very often, or those actions would be in character (would be normal actions for you), since you do them often. Acting out of character has to be an uncommon event. But telling false stories about yourself can be common, and is.

People often naively believe that their own stories about themselves are mostly true. They sometimes extend this gullibility to the stories of many people in their social group. Sometimes they participate in creating the stories about their friends, family, coworkers, etc.

A major step towards a reality-based view of yourself is to learn what lots of the common stories other people tell are, and to recognize many of them as false, and become good at catching people's lies. Once you're good at that, then you could be suspicious of any of your own stories that, if someone else said it, you'd think it was probably false. You could investigate those stories further using the same methods by which you would question someone else.

Discussion is externalized thinking. Thinking is self-discussion.

Not entirely. This mostly applies to the conscious aspects of thinking. It’s thinking that you pay attention to, not autopilot/habits.

Rational critical analysis looks at the content of ideas, not their sources. It doesn’t matter if the source is you or someone else, it’s the same idea either way. The same sort of analysis needs to be done to evaluate two rival ideas regardless of their sources – which means, regardless of whether they come from two different people in a discussion or from one person who is thinking silently.

Discussion lets other people share criticism with you and learn from you. Those are big benefits. They help share good ideas and overcome people’s personal weaknesses. Some of your weaknesses are not shared by some of your discussion partners, and you don’t have some of their weaknesses, so there’s lots of scope to help each other.

Good thinkers can think out loud and can think as part of discussion. They don’t have to think alone first, in advance of discussion. They can do some thinking in real time, and some in fairly near real time (writing a text reply slower than talking out loud as one thinks, but without taking any significant break to think things over).

People who have trouble thinking in discussion also have trouble thinking outside of discussion. But there are some important differences. People who get pressured and socially manipulated a lot can think better alone because those things happen less when there isn’t another person directly involved. But if they were a better thinker they’d deal with that better.

Many people believe they know an idea, they just can’t explain it well. They separate thinking and communication as different skills. But if you can explain the idea to yourself, you can use that same explanation with other people!

People also claim they have arguments that convince themselves but wouldn’t convince you. This is biased. They believe it’s because they have access to information that you don’t, e.g. their own internal feelings or memories. But they can tell you those. You and they should both see the evidence the same way: “Joe reports remembering X.” or “Bob says that he feels Y very strongly and seriously.” The reason they think it’s more convincing for them, than you, is they realize that those kinds of reports are unreliable and you won’t accept it, but they believe those kinds of reports, anyway, when they are the reporter. That’s biased and bad thinking. People should learn to be skeptical of their own beliefs. If they know they have a belief that a reasonable external person would be skeptical of, they should doubt it themselves, too.

People also separate truth-seeking and debating as different skills. They think the better thinker, with the better idea, can lose a debate because he is less good at clever rhetoric. This is reasonably accurate when both thinkers aren’t very good. But great thinkers can handle these issues. A good thinker can point out rhetoric, manipulation, faking, etc. A good thinker will refocus the discussion on key points like what are the criticisms of each idea, and ask the other person to cooperate in joint truth-seeking. The gullible people in the audience may still be fooled, but that should clarify matters enough for the reasonable people to be able to see what’s going on. (Of course errors can always happen. There are no guarantees.)

All this means: learning to discuss is a way of learning to think well. And learning to think well without learning to discuss well is implausible and is a sign of fooling yourself. Because thinking and discussion are linked, and most genuine skill at either one also works for the other.

I make freely available two main categories of things. 1) Online writing/video/audio. This is non-interactive and distribution costs are approximately zero. 2) Interactive discussion, which is expensive in terms of my time. It overlaps with (1) because people are welcome to read the discussions without saying anything. There’s also overlap the other way because people can start a discussion about e.g. a blog post.

Most of my online material can be found within a few clicks from https://elliottemple.com

There’s a huge amount of material. I’ve written ~50,000 public contributions to discussions, in addition to the blog posts, essays, YouTube, etc. I also sell digital products which are much cheaper than consulting because they aren’t personalized – the same work can be sold to multiple customers.

Free Stuff

How many people read books by a great author and become even 1% as great as the author? That’s very rare! Non-interactive stuff helps people, and it’s easier to engage with, but the results are usually pretty limited. People read/watch too passively and uncritically, don’t think of enough questions or pursue enough followup issues, understand stuff vaguely and think they agree (too low standards), and don’t apply/use the ideas enough. And they misunderstand parts which causes misunderstandings of later parts, which causes even more misunderstandings of later parts, which can spiral out of control.

So what about discussions? I’m available for free discussions primarily at the FI email group (and the Curiosity website which is similar). I visit other forums periodically but you can’t rely on that.

I discuss primarily because it's part of being a philosopher – I can get questions and criticism, learn things, practice writing, practice understanding people, share ideas, think about issues, etc.

Participating effectively in FI discussions is hard and doesn’t work well for most people. I know lots of specific problems people have, but there’s a fundamental issue:

The FI group is about reason and intellectual progress. To use it well requires being good at those things or being on a path to get good at them.

Discussion methods and skills are, essentially, thinking methods and skills. One has to be a good thinker to discuss effectively. This is because thinking is self-discussion, or, put the other way around, discussion is externalized thinking.

The same epistemology governs both discussion and thinking. The same methods for resolving a disagreement between ideas apply if those ideas are in one person or in multiple people.

Relevant skills include dealing with criticism rationally, organizing ideas effectively, being able to look at issues objectively (avoiding personalizing and bias), coming up with questions, knowing when you do or don’t know enough, and figuring out how to apply ideas.

Learning to use the FI group well is a somewhat equivalent problem to learning to think well. So that’s hard.

A tip for using FI: If you think something is bad (e.g. that a person was rude, mean, demanding, pushy, dumb, not listening, etc.), ask about it. People (especially the better posters) often do things on purpose for reasons. The online discussion group is 25 years old and has developed and refined its approach intentionally (guided especially by David Deutsch and myself). If you choose to silently disagree with something, you should to be tolerant, not have it start building to a bigger problem. This comes up particularly because of violations of social-cultural norms.

Second tip: Be careful when people aren’t talking to you directly. When speaking to a newer poster people often try to write something that’ll make sense to him, which doesn’t require as much background knowledge. But other posts may build on years of prior context and can easily be misunderstood by newcomers who don’t ask tons of questions.

Paid Consulting

Paid consulting is about helping the customer with what they want help with. In free discussions, my primary goal is my own learning, and I interact with people when our projects overlap. What my goal is has large consequences for what happens.

When consulting, I make things easier for customers and they can control the topics. In free discussions, I often ask topic-changing questions and I’m often interested in judging people and filtering out irrationality and dishonesty. In free discussions, I often don’t take hints and I often want things to be made clear that other people don’t want to make clear.

In consulting, I help organize what happens and help take responsibility for the other person achieving their goals. In free discussions, I expect people to manage their own affairs (like deciding how much time to spend, when, on what). I volunteer help less and expect people to take reasonable steps for making progress such as reading books and critically discussing as they go along.

Free discussions are mostly text, asynchronous, often partial effort/attention, sometimes slow or no reply, and are a permanent part of the public record. In paid consulting customers reliably get high attention and effort, and can get faster help, voice chat, real time interaction, and privacy.

Free discussion replies are often generic on purpose. Instead of giving personal help, I take the issue someone brought up and write an answer that would be of interest to many other people too.

People often don’t really understand what sharing ideas publicly means. It means your post is just like an article or book by a public figure. People can scrutinize it, discuss it, criticize it harshly, misunderstand it, analyze things the author (you) unintentionally revealed about himself, etc., and the author has no control over any of that. The author doesn’t have to participate or read what’s said, but what he wrote is now evidence to be used by others as they choose. Your post can become a permanent example or reference point about irrationality or some other flaw. FI posters sometimes bring up quotes from years ago.

Lots of people think they want the role of a responsible intellectual/adult/peer/equal in a rational discussion forum. “Reason? Of course I want that! Sounds great!” But that’s hard and people usually don’t like it, and they'd be better off buying help. Admitting weakness and inequality, and publicly taking on more of a student/learner/child/beginner role, also doesn’t work well for most people (they both dislike it and don’t know how to do it well).

Another reason for consulting: in the medium or long run, to get much value from others, there’s no good way to get out of offering value to others. Money and rationality are both values one can offer. Money exists in greater supply and is easier to come by and offer. Intellectual progress is hard and finding ways to throw money at the problem can be good. (I would personally be thrilled if I could find effective ways to spend more money to get philosophical benefits.)

Human civilization has more knowledge than any one person. We have a division of intellectual labor. Some people specialize in chemistry, others law, others fashion, others history, others football. A specialist in a type of knowledge is called an “expert” or even an “authority” for his field. The division of intellectual labor has progressed to the point of narrow specialities – e.g. we have experts in ancient Greek history, or WWII history, rather than all of history. There are different kinds of scientists, and then within a kind, e.g. physicist, there are sub-kinds, e.g. astrophysicist.

People accept expert advice from car mechanics, doctors, lawyers, scientists, tech support people, sports coaches and more. You may be able to learn about a few topics, in detail, yourself, but not all the topics that come up in your life. There’s too much to know it all yourself.

If you didn’t use other people’s expert knowledge – if you didn’t participate in the intellectual division of labor – you’d be handicapped, have a limited life and not accomplish much compared to people who do (just the same as a person who doesn’t participate in the economic division of labor cannot produce much compared to people who do participate).

The intellectual division of labor raises problems to be addressed. How do you know which ideas from other people to use? How do you judge an expert’s claim when you don’t know much about the field? How can decide what to think when experts in a field disagree with each other?

One attempted solution is credentials. Some people perform the task of judging experts. But the people saying which experts are good are themselves experts (in the field of judging expertise), so you’re left with the same problem of deciding which experts to listen to. That's just moved the problem: instead of deciding whether to listen to a scientist saying humans evolved, you decide whether to listen to a guy telling you he knows which scientists to listen to. And normally the qualifications of the people giving out credentials in a field are that they are experts in that field (not that they actually have any special expertise at judging experts), so it’s really just “Listen to me about which physicists you should listen to, because I’m a good physicist.”

Another attempted solution is reputation. Some people have a bunch of success in some visible way and then people listen to them more. And reputations can partially carry over to their associates, and to a lesser degree to their associate’s associates.

Another attempted solution – which is how a lot of reputation works – is to judge by popularity. But great ideas usually start out unpopular.

Another way people judge expertise is by charisma, social status, social skill, and stuff like that (including dressing well and speaking in a “smart” sounding way). This is a poor method. It leads to competitions not at field expertise but at expertise in impressing people and presenting as credible to them.

Another way people judge experts is by which ones create material (articles, books, videos, etc.) for a general audience that they like. This isn’t very good at figuring out who is the best at the details of the field because it looks for skills like being able to communicate well about the basics of the field.

I propose a better way to judge experts. This solution is especially meant for intellectuals rather than, e.g., bike repair experts. Experts should provide public information which can be evaluated by lay people. It’s their job to prove their own case if they want to be considered an expert. But how? Specifically by being open to debate. Experts should be open to questions and criticism, in public, and organize the information in a way that people can look it over and see who blocked further progress on resolving the disagreement. The public should favor experts who have addressed all outstanding criticism of their knowledge over experts who have withdrawn from that kind of discussion, ignored criticisms, refused to answer questions, derailed debates, etc. Experts should be judged by the current state of the debate in the field, and should organize that debate so it isn’t a mess with no clear answers.

People who don’t know how to do this aren’t fit to be experts in a fields that deal with controversies (but maybe they can successfully be an expert accountant). If your field has ongoing disagreements and debate, then you need to know how to organize and evaluate disagreements and debate in order to do effective work in your field.

The starting point of clarifying the state of the debate is to invite debate. The people who decline debate are the people blocking resolution of the issues. The people who are unwilling to try to address questions and criticisms should be presumed wrong, even though they might be right about some particular issues, because their methodology – their way of dealing with knowledge – is not oriented towards truth-seeking. People who reject intellectual collaboration, on principle, are limiting their participation in the intellectual division of labor and thereby limiting their effectiveness (just like a business that won’t consider any business deals with other businesses).

A good expert has the general attitude: “If I’m wrong, tell me what I’m wrong about. And I’ve told you what you’re wrong about and I’m still waiting for you to respond.” And he thinks of debate as primarily a matter of writing, over time, not verbal debate in person. So he can write a blog post criticizing something, and that advances the state of the debate, and if it’s not answered then that shows the other guy isn’t debating (or discussing, which should be the same thing). And it shows the other guy also lacks proxies to discuss for him. And lacks sources he could cite that address the issue with no new work. (Or else he has the perfect answer, already written, and just won’t bother to share the link, and none of his fans will share the link either? Not a plausible story.)

Openness to debate is a well known criterion, so many people pretend to meet it. But most don’t pretend in more than a token way. Suppose I wrote a blog post with some questions and criticisms for an expert. You, right now, could predict that most experts would ignore me. For example, Richard Dawkins would ignore me (and that’s not mere speculation, I have actually contacted him and been ignored, even though I’m an expert who has written serious criticism of some of his work). His openness to debate is limited in some ways.

What are the limits on the openness to debate of Dawkins and the large majority of other supposed experts? I could try to analyze and criticize them and talk about some Paths Forward stuff. But there’s a much simpler way for lay people to evaluate the matter. Has Dawkins written down what his limits on debate are, himself? Has he publicly shared a policy stating his openness to debate, including the limits and the reasons for those limits? Has he asked if anyone knows any ways to remove or reduce any of those limits? No he has not. Because he isn’t seriously interested in discussing and getting disagreements resolved.

Many experts were more open to debate when they were younger, and they get disillusioned after many bad, ineffective discussions. They give up and decide talking with people is mostly a waste of time. What they should have done is learned better methods that better conserve their time, get to the point faster, and so on (see Paths Forward for info on how to do that). Organize the debate better instead of giving up on debate (and then dishonestly pretending you’re still open to debate). Learn enough philosophy – methods of dealing with ideas, learning, resolving disagreements between ideas, etc. – to be an effective intellectual. Sure that’s hard (most philosophy is crap) but if you want to be a good intellectual you need to deal with that problem and find or create and then use actual good methods for making intellectual progress (and if you think you have those, write them down and expose those to criticism and debate, and also make them available for others to learn and use if you think they actually work well! As I have done.).

By the way, what if all the experts in a field are bad? What if none of them are really open to debate? Then it’s hard to evaluate, so you should ask a philosopher (general purpose expert) to evaluate the field (and you can judge which philosophers are experts by their openness to debate).

Parents and schools torture the interest in ideas out of children. They are extremely effective at this. The result is a world empty of intellectuals.

People don't want unbounded discussion of ideas. They will debate a specific topic, like minimum wage, if you aren't allowed to talk about discussion and thinking methodology, how important the issue is relative to other issues, how it fits into the bigger picture of life, etc. And if you don't expect to actually reach a conclusion, and don't mind if they give up halfway through without explanation. The first time a problem comes up which isn't part of the limited topic (e.g. they think your communications indicate negative feelings, or they have negative feelings themselves), the discussion soon ends without problem solving because that kind of problem solving is out of bounds.

Most people and forums are hostile merely to continuing to discuss a topic for more than a few days. They're also broadly hostile to quoting what people say and replying to that, rather than everyone just making general comments on the issue and then everyone agreeing that everyone is smart and their comments merit respect. Also people don't like criticism – they don't want to be told what their mistakes are. People view mistakes as bad things to avoid because they don't expect to actually solve problems (if you can't/won't correct a mistake, being told about it isn't helpful).

People don't expect or seek progress. They think discussions are a hobby where you try to sound clever and entertain each other. They aren't actually trying to contribute to human knowledge.

I want to talk with people who are trying to make a substantial contribution to human knowledge. There are two ways they can approach that goal. They can think they already know enough to work on achieving it now, or they can think they don't know enough and be trying to learn enough to get there. Identifying which category they are in, or even saying what goals they do and don't have, is the kind of thing that people generally don't want to talk about (it's out of bounds since it isn't keeping the discussion limited to e.g. whether or not a border wall is a good idea).

Another question I ask people, which is also out of bounds, is whether they have a discussion forum or know of one they think is good and participate at. And if the answer is no, is that something they want and would they like to join my forum and actively participate? And if they are going to judge my forum negatively, will they say why and will that judgment be open to clarifications, questions, criticism, etc? People don't like to talk about this because it involves admitting they aren't looking for discussion. (Sometimes they pretend that they already have plenty of great discussion, so they don't need more. They have to claim it's private though, or else I'd ask to see it. People who claim to have lots of great private discussion, but none in public, are liars and also are, apparently, not interested in contributing their knowledge to the rest of the world.)

Lack of discussion means there are no paths forward for people's mistakes to get corrected, even when the correction is known.

Lack of debate means obscuring which ideas do and do not survive criticism. Which ideas can handle questions and scrutiny? Let's find out!