Powder and stone, or, why medieval rulers loved castles

    information is never divorced from a person (sometimes it's a programmer). You're not smart enough to evaluate knowledge unless you have expertise yourself

  – outsourcing your thinking to "experts" is just as bad as outsourcing your thinking to LLMs. In both cases, you are placing the onus of thinking on an outside source, and depriving yourself of the richness of life in the long run.

  – I quote the literature for a reason. *I don't want you to take my word for it.* You can read Caesar's and Robert McNamara's thoughts; you can get context directly from historians; and then see the story told via tapestry to draw your own conclusion.

  – I also do my best to link to specific pages of the sources so that you can read the quotes in context. It takes a lot of effort to do this. As things aren't always publicly available, and it's a PITA to keep track of everything.

  – you're harkening to the idea that there "adults" in the room. There are no adults in the room. Never have been. Not for anything of consequence; definitely not for something at the cutting edge of technology. It feels like that because we write hagiographies after the fact.

  — learning how to screen ideas for yourself on a self-developed baloney scale is one of the most important skills an educated adult can inculcate. It's sad that we've shied away from its explicit cultivation.

  – "smart"-ness is partly inculcated. A tool (or a mind) grows rusty with disuse.

  – why someone is saying something is tied to them, but information itself can be neutral. Its *presentation* can be biased. What's told / left out can be an issue. But the fact that the moon exists or William the Conqueror used castles for his invasion has nothing to do with me. Those facts will be true no matter who I am as a person.

  – yes, the way I have presented the information / the facts is tied to me. It's tied to my quirks of personality and my thought process as well as my personal biases (of which there are many). Which is why I make the effort of quoting primary / secondary sources.

  – I write these things because I want to learn from people who are more knowledgeable / smarter than me. And I want to be surrounded by people who are smarter than me.

  – you don't have to read it. it's just like a blogpost man, on the internet. doesn't really matter in the long run.

Right but thinking doesnt occur in a vacuum. Thinking is a garbage in/garbage out process. Stopping and looking at a source to determine whether it is suitable to be processed is a worthy task.

To be clear, I dont think the parent comments criticism of the blog is worthwhile, but this element of your criticism of his criticism is also pretty useless.

I guess from your name and response that you are the author. I certainly don't want to disrespect anyone personally, and beyond a doubt you know more than I do about castles. I do my own research on the same level; I love your intellectual curiosity.

I disagree on the theoretical claims in your comment here:

> – outsourcing your thinking to "experts" is just as bad as outsourcing your thinking to LLMs. In both cases, you are placing the onus of thinking on an outside source, and depriving yourself of the richness of life in the long run.

Therefore it's better to outsource thinking to amateurs? You might say, 'I'm not saying to outsource thinking to me' and I agree - nobody said anything about outsourcing.

I'm suggesting the opposite: Think more critically, more seriously, and without restraint, and that starts with understanding there's a person behind the information, with perspective, expertise, uneven knowledge and experience, biases and objectivity, etc.

You're depriving yourself of much of the richness of life by not taking critical thinking more seriously. Truth is a very hard, precious thing; knowledge and wisdom even harder; care about them more deeply.

To learn about software development (if that's your profession, as an educated guess), do you read a medieval historian who read a few papers and books and talked to historian friends? For this article, did you read papers and books by experts or by people on your level?

I'd be interested in talking to you about the topic, but I wouldn't take it as a piece of research. I talk to people all the time - most of the time! - who aren't promulgating their words as research. Who would have anything to say?

> — learning how to screen ideas for yourself on a self-developed baloney scale is one of the most important skills an educated adult can inculcate

The research shows that people don't do that accurately, and more educated people perform even worse. Without prior knowledge, how can you prevent people from midleading you? People have been misleading people forever; 'used car salesperson' is an old cliche. Even harder, how do you prevent people from misleading you about things they misunderstand themselves - they will sound even more sincere? Telling people they can figure it out is like telling them they can dodge bullets.

Or another way to look at it is to use the baloney scale developed by science and scholarship for centuries, to great effect: Post-positivism. Emprical knowledge, scholarship, and understanding humans minds always are behind it.

The idea that expertise has no value is hard to defend. Do you not seek out doctors and lawyers? Software developers?

Like I said, I do my own research on the same level. There's nothing wrong with that, but people should know what their reading.

I don't think I'd publish my similar research because there is so much professional research available, and certainly without talking to someone who knows the subject deeply and can point out what I've missed. It would be an interesting hypothesis to bring up to historians of the period. How about Bret Devereaux, a military historian of medieval and ancient Europe, who publishes a popularish blog and might be open to it? Why not, if you care deeply about critical thinking and truth?