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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tekboy who wrote (30614)	5/24/2002 2:12:54 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

. . .just not for the folks around here, . . . Whoops, I think I took a hit. Sorry, but I didn't say that well. Let me try a real short version, once again. Just take the Foreign Affairs articles as an illustration, generally, if not always, written by some sort of "expert" in the field. It helps when someone like you annotates the credentials and political leanings of the writers. But I take that as only one data point in arriving at my own conclusion about these folk, not the mother of all data points. Frankly, and I hope this does not upset you, I read the FA much as I read the columnists. I need to read several articles by the same person, know their positions in various administrations, ratchet in the fact that, as your good friend, Christopher Hitchens puts it ;-), FA is the house organ of the foreign policy establishment, along with your stated views of these folk, to help me read their arguments. I don't wish to downplay the educational moment for me sometime last year in which I commented that Martin Indyk essay sounded like he was trying to position himself for a place in the Bush administration and your reply was that this was not the guy to do that. That helped a great deal. And I've listened to Indyk with a different hearing aid since. Sometimes he sounds like your Indyk, sometimes like the one I detected in that essay. But I would not have been able to see the first without your help. Thanks. Just rambling. Trying to procrastinate rather than pull up more weeds in the garden. What a beautiful Jersey day.

To: tekboy who wrote (30614)	5/24/2002 4:30:05 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

who seem to have, shall we say, rather a great deal of time, Time on my hands? Who, me? When my Father retired, in 1969, at age 65, he said he planned to spend the rest of his life reading. He did so, and never got bored. He died at 92. He would have loved the Internet. I am in the same position, and love every minute of it. Tek, you are in a great position to judge "experts," but one thing I have noticed. Experts do tend to disagree. And the more expert they are, the more they disagree. Even the best experts tend to come to conclusions, and then research and write to support those conclusions. In the "soft" sciences, such as we deal in, that disagreement intensifies. In the "hard" sciences, eventually, you have to face reality if you do this and you are wrong. But you don't get caught like that in the "soft" ones. You can get away with being wrong longer. Our one saving grace in making judgements about these experts is their "predictablity." Do the experts we read predict coming events with any accuracy? Are they more right than wrong? Unfortunately for us, They know we will judge them on this basis, so they usually "wiggle" and end their learned articles with questions about what will happen, and "Time will Tell" answers. So what the "experts" in the learned journals, such as FA, tend to do, is "Rain Dance" us. They will display their knowledge of the field, and their writing ability, to impress the hell out of us, and then leave the conclusions as wide open as possible to give themselves room to adjust their next article to the actual outcome of the events they were writing about. But fortunately, given enough time, even in this group of "experts" the best do come to the top. Bernard Lewis is a good example right now, although I am sure you know some who you think are better. You are in the "expert" business. I am not. It is much easier to get away with this in the learned journals than in the daily newspapers. The columnists we read daily don't have the depth of knowledge, the space available, or the ability to keep from taking a position, as the writers for monthlies and quarterlies do. We also expect a higher level of "readabilty" from the columnists. So we give the columnists a harder time than we do the "experts." As my Father used to say, an "expert" is a guy who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is, then keeps your watch!