Interesting article. I've long felt that our systems for group discussion and decision making are too primitive, in part because they make no attempt to adjust for the value of each comment. Idiots and blowhards get to take up as much space on the page as anybody else. This is tiresome for readers and exasperating for contributors. If comments could be fairly and impartially judged for their value before being seen threads could be condensed. Research such as this can maybe help pave the way in that direction?
If Metaknowledge becomes a widely-used technique, will people be able to game it?
For instance, if you have a resturant review site, and someone logs into rate their own place highly, can they get more weight by going to a couple of other reviews and rating it as the crowd did?
Metaknowledge sounds like a good match for "proper scoring" rules, where the score gives you an incentive to be honest about your predictions/judgments.
So in that sense, even if someone displays good metaknowledge for other restaurants, increasing their score, if they then register an inaccurate prediction/judgment about their own crappy restaurant, it would damage their own overall metaknowledge score.
The "innocence" in this phrase refers just as much to having never been on the receiving end of an injustice, as having never perpetrated one. Think "innocent to the ways of the world."
That definition doesn't jive with the sentence before "Likewise, you should beware of politicians who rail against rampant corruption; they doth protest too much."
>> A rule of thumb is that 100 per cent confidence means you’re right 70 to 85 per cent of the time.
That's actually pretty good, isn't it? Considering that nobody is going to be right 100% of the time, what are the over-confident really risking? A wrong-rate 10% worse than the best?
That's good enough to quip that you should always be 100% confident, because that will maximise your chances to be right most of the time even if you have no idea what you're talking about.
The real problem with overconfidence is that it's annoying, so you should solve that problem through better communication rather than messing around with how your brain perceives risk.
> In the end, the lowest common denominator dominates. It’s a common scourge in social settings: think of dinner conversations that consist of people repeating to one another the things they all read in The New York Times.
Blessed is the man who thinks of parroting the NYT as lowest common denominator conversation.
