Item — HN Reader

His predictions don’t matter… what matters is the thesis and what it is based upon. Literally nobody can predict to the month or even year when a bubble will pop. But you can identify and document that a bubble exists, and what the actors are doing.

When reading an article you’re supposed to analyze the actual thesis, not just evaluate if the person is an oracle or not

1 comments

If you fervently posit a theory but its predictions fail, why would anyone believe it?

Because it’s economics, a social science. Not a physics experiment you can replicate in a lab. You do what a serious person does: look at the thesis, look at the sources, look at the numbers, and do your own analysis

And you’d consider zitron a serious person?

Yes, but I meant the readers. Ed Zitron himself is irrelevant, we should be able to look at the thesis and evaluate it independently. That’s media consumption 101…

You can't feasibly read all posts about AI in the world and analyse each one individually with the level of care you prescribe. You have to apply some heuristics to decide what to read, and someone being consistently wrong in the past is an effective one.

If you don’t want to engage with his work, sure. Was this thesis wrong though? That’s the only thing that matters. My point is that the predictions of future aren’t what matters to evaluate a research. A thesis can be right, but the prediction of the next steps at play wrong. A prediction can be right for the wrong reasons.

Very often predictions are useless to evaluate an analysis, you need to look at the underlying assumptions and facts, and see how they reflect reality. Ignore the person, look at the story and decide for yourself if it makes sense or not

Serious people own their words and admit their mistakes.

If you mean Ed Zitron, he did exactly that for his past predictions