Some of the useful things inside:
- Microeconomic tools for judging the epistemic incentives of groups of experts
- Concise and useful explanations for how major insitutions (academia, medicine, politics, venture capitalism) break
- Case studies in how to successful use Aumman's agreement theorem in real life
The most valuable part of this book by far is chapter 3, which is an extended dialogue between a cynical conventional economist ("C.C.E" or 'Cecie') and a visitor from a different world, trying to explain why a particular institution is killing babies. The example is a real one - the FDA hasn't approved a simple set of fats for intravenous baby food, causing severe brain damage in something like dozens of babies per year. And the explanation is a whirlwind tour of how our institutions work and how they break, with many concepts that I've been able to use elsewhere to great benefit.
Above all, this book has changed the way I think about learning from experts. I'll end my review with an example of how I analyse things like this now.
Recently someone came to me proposing a project for building a math-education website - combining math explanations and machine learning algorithms, connecting you with the best explanation given your background knowledge. And of my first 3 thoughts, 2 were about how the site would function and how a user would interact with it - it's important to concretely visualise a product to figure out if it feels like it would work. However, my 3rd thought was to do an adequacy analysis - I looked for data points about whether I should expect that, if this is a good idea that can work, why hasn't someone already done it? Think about all the money and time people spend on education each year - all the tutors in universities, all the teachers in high schools, all the assistant lecturers and support staff and government subsidies. Surely, if this project was a good idea, someone would've built it and it would be a common website we all use. Is the fact that this doesn't exist already enough evidence that it won't work?
In general I don't see the educational marketplace of resources changing rapidly in response to new tech and research. There was a bunch of research about spaced repetition and how memorisation works, that nobody has jumped to incorporate into how universities work. Many people can tell you the best physics/math textbooks (e.g. Feynman Lectures) but most students will never read them. It *doesn't* look to me like a space where it would require a great deal of effort to out-do the best in the field. You might counter by pointing out the success of Khan Academy, but personally I'm not sure I'd consider the fact that a single dad can make lots of videos and do better than everyone else, a sign of success for the educational market.
I'm not actually very confident in this analysis. However, the best part is that I can learn about the whole field by working on the one project. If the project fails, or I find out that someone else has tried this and failed, then I'll change my assessment of other projects in this space. On the other hand, if the project succeeds, I will update about how good the educational market is at incentivising people to create useful things like this.
I wouldn't have made these models and hypotheses before, and for that reason I'm really glad I read this book.
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