The problem, of course, is thath the reverence for the well known tends to be accompanied by a disdain for the not so well known. The physicist Luis Alvarez summed up this point of view decades ago when he said: «There is no democracy in physics. We can’t say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi.» While this approach makes sense in terms of economizing on your attention -you can’t listen to or read everyone, so you only listen to the best- it has a number of dubious assumptions built into it, including the idea that we automatically know who second-rate are, even before hearing them, as well as the idea that everything Fermi had to say was inherently valuable
The Wisdom of Crowds por The Wisdom of Crowds
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