Put differently, we’ve been looking for human wisdom in the wrong place. Perhaps it is not in the mind of the human decider, but embodied in the standards and practices that determined exactly which pieces of information to put on their desk. The rest is just math—or, at any rate, should
Brian Christian • The Alignment Problem
a world where you can use AI to draw upon the compiled wisdom of an expert that you trust—that is a world we are living in right now, thanks to the emergence of long context models. This should be good news, professionally speaking, for people who do indeed possess wisdom that other people consider valuable.
Claudia added
One of the key lessons of the Wisdom of Crowds is that we don't always know where good information is. That's why, in general, it's smarter to cast as wide a net as possible, rather than wasting time figuring out who should be in the group and who should not. This idea is well suited to the internet.
James Surowiecki • The Wisdom of Crowds
sari added
To solve problems, our brains have evolved to employ cognitive heuristics—rough shortcuts that get the right answer often, but not all the time.
Eliezer Yudkowsky • Rationality
This brings me to the single most obvious notion that correct contrarians grasp, and that people who have vastly overestimated their own competence don’t realize: It takes far less work to identify the correct expert in a pre-existing dispute between experts, than to make an original contribution to any field that is remotely healthy.
Eliezer Yudkowsky • Inadequate Equilibria
Kojo and added
More important, there’s no real evidence that one can become expert in something as broad as “decision making” or “policy” or “strategy.” Auto repair, piloting, skiing, perhaps even management: these are skills that yield to application, hard work, and native talent. But forecasting an uncertain future and deciding the best course of action in the
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