Matt Teichman

speaker

11,523 appearances 153 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2009 last heard 21 Jul

Matt Teichman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Elucidations · Episode 156: Oliver Traldi discusses political expertise · 7 Jun 2026 podcast

I know this would never happen, but hypothetically, you might imagine two experts talking past each other.

Yeah,

that.

Does that mean that they, like, co-author a paper?

Yeah,

You might also just sort of worry that the skill of identifying talent in your domain is not necessarily the same skill as yourself having talent in that domain.

You might think those are like identifying other people who are good in the same way that you are.

It might be different from being good in the way that you are.

Yeah.

I mean like when I was a PhD student in philosophy 12 million years ago, all I ever heard from admissions committees was they're reading recommendation letters and every single candidate that came in was like the next David Lewis.

I'm like, are they really the next David Lewis?

Or are they a carbon copy of a carbon copy of a carbon copy of – who knows how many generations off of David Lewis at best?

so we're like raising all these worries for political expertise and you know i'm now i'm starting to wonder like is there such a thing as political expertise you know so one of the things we mentioned was maybe experts are the people who have good track records in their area you know so i don't know uh

The lead engineer at the Toyota factory or whatever, probably they have expertise in building cars that don't fall apart when you drive them for 10 feet.

So I can trust that a car that came off their assembly line is going to have that property.

But like is there really any such thing as a track record in political advisors, politicians, political philosophers?

It just seems like the –

Building a car scenario involves very controlled conditions that are repeatable, whereas like history like never repeats itself exactly.

And, you know, and all of that, you know, there's so many different intervening factors and yada, yada, yada.

So I wonder, should this push us to skepticism about the very idea that somebody can be a political expert?

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