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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3849 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 14, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How does anyone be a pundit? it's so hard to get facts/details right. is it the job of the editor, or extensive research, or just being really good/smart at getting every detail right? some people seem to really excel at this. i have long maintained that being a good pundit or thought leader is harder than even being an executive of a fortune 100 company in terms of skill, because you need to got so many details right and the audience is far more astute than just shareholders or other employees.

Whether or not the audience is more astute than people with an actual financial stake…they’re vulnerable to persuasion, too. Get enough momentum, and your fans will handle the apologetics for you.

Get enough momentum, and your fans will handle the apologetics for you.

Every once in a while, someone here frames an idea just so. Thank you.

Well, sometimes you can get a lot of facts/details and even predictions right, just by luck, and then when your prospective audience checks the pundit-claims database for your weighted logarithmic score you'll still be near the top.

Wait ... do the pundit-claims databases not weight their summary scores using the importance of each claim and the total number of claims made? Do they not use a strictly-proper scoring rule, or do they use questionable conversion tables when quantifying English adjectives as probabilities? Do they not even exist?

Well, damn, that might be our problem.

Whoops, best I can do is give percentages of claims found true/false/etc.. Good luck with your summary stats!

You should start one, but only staff it with people who are anti-woke, just to be safe.

because you need to got so many details right and the audience is far more astute than just shareholders or other employees

The audience may have more aggregate wisdom but that doesn't necessarily mean much: I know some stuff about programming but, when I listen to Last Week Tonight talking about Turkmenistan, I have no idea how right or wrong they are. But I like (or liked) John Oliver so it feels more trustworthy.

Or, essentially, this

Which is why the sort of shamelessness Jim Cramer (to use 2rafa's example) has might be useful. You can't fool all of the people, but you can fool some of them a lot of the time. If you simply refuse to take responsibility for being wrong you probably last longer by not popping the confidence of the people who are sticking with you compared to a more intellectually honest person.

Being a good pundit is difficult and requires specialization and probably some sort of (formal or informal) support organization. But being a pundit that gets interviewed a lot? Making a career out of it? That is quite different skillset.

I think being a pundit is more about telling your audience what they want to hear than getting facts right. Most audiences do want their pundits to at least loosely tell the truth, but getting the narrative they want to hear is really the number 1 priority.

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