Unqualified Offerings

From the Costello list – one by Danielle, then one by me . . .

By Thoreau
I’ve just started reading Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds.” I’ll post a full review when I finish it, but this part, regarding the difficulty of identifying genuine and useful expertise, leaped out at me:
We think that experts will, in some sense, identify themselves, announcing their presence and demonstrating their expertise by their level [...]

The “indoor children” phenomenon substantially stems from the loss of roaming privileges in the US and Britain and maybe elsewhere too. I compare the reduction in free travel for kids to the reluctance of football coaches to go for it on fourth down even when it makes sense statistically. When the conventional wisdom is that [...]

Julian Sanchez muses further on the overrated album concept, and links to a copy of Chuck Klosterman’s “Ten Most Accurately Rated Bands.” (”Nobody wants to be overrated, except for people who like to live in big houses.”)