A serious political engine could have money to defend against lawsuits, but, also, the more money you have, the more it's worth suing you. (I think at the very least having someone who specializes in handling all the hassle of getting sued would be worth it). 

This suggest that the organization that has the money to defend against lawsuits is not the same organization as the organization making the potentially libelous claims. 

There are broad organizations like Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) that can do that. You could also fund an organization that's more specific about defending people within your coalition. 

An over-broad skepticism of experts risks turning people into the kind of credulous fools who try to heal themselves with the powers of quartz crystals.

There's a reason why I spoke about generally being skeptical. The person who easily accepts claims about the healing powers of quartz crystals is not broadly skeptical. They are not the person who often says "I don't know". 

Especially if you apply some common sense, and if you keep track of which experts appear to be full it (e.g., the replication crisis)

The replication crisis is about the community of psychology getting much better at getting rid of bullshit. Before the crisis you could have listened to Feynmann's cargo cult science speech and him explaining why rat psychology is cargo cult science and observe that the same criticisms apply to most of psychology. 

Fields of science that behave like what Feymann describes as cargo cult science but who don't had their replication crisis are less trustworthy than post-replication crisis psychology. Post-replication crisis psychology still isn't perfect but it's a step up. 

There are many cases where systematically increased transparency that reveal problems in an expert community should get you to trust them more because they have found ways to reduce problems. 

If you ask "What do I do if I don't know?", there's the answer is to make sure that you have decent feedback systems that allow you to change course if what you are doing isn't working. 

There's the policy of generally being more skeptical both on claims that something is true or something is false and more often say "I don't know".

I think the key difference between a normal guy who believes in God and someone in a psych ward is often that the person who believes in God does so because it's what other people in authority told him but the person in the psych ward thinks for themselves and came up with their delusion on their own. This often means their beliefs are self-referential in a way that prevents them from updating due to external feedback. 

If you believe that the word rational is supposed to mean something along the lines of "taking actions that optimize systematically for winning", believing something just because an authority told you can sometimes be irrational and sometimes be rational. 

If you want to talk well about behavior you don't like, it makes sense to use words that refer to the reason for why the behavior is bad. Credulous or gullible might be words that better describe a lot of normie behavior. The person who believes in god just because his parents and teachers told him is credulous. 

I think the key reason why many people believed Oliver Sacks is that he had a good reputation within the scientific community and people want to "believe the science". People don't like to believe that scientists produce fraudulent data. It's the same reason why people believe Matthew Walker.

I did have one bioinformatics professor who did made a point to say something in every lecture of the semester that we should not believe the literature. Many people who think of themselves as skeptic are not skeptic when it comes to claims made by people who have a good reputation in the scientific community. 

I think you underrate how much of the job of a journalist is about simplifying complex events into a narrative that's easy to read and consume for the audience of the newspaper. 

Being cowardly and being scheming are not the same thing. Being scheming is about having a plan and executing it. Being cowardly is about being afraid and acting based on the fear.

My main point is that the kind of jobs that Graeber talks about isn't primarily "trade" or "leadership".

There are some people on the left who think that any job that's doing trade or leadership is a problem, but that's not true for Graeber or tech/progress study people who want less middleman. 

If you take universities, they had had leadership fifty years ago as well. The growth of university administration in comparison to professors in the Great Stagnation timeframe is about other middleman.

There are cases where middleman produce coordination but generally the more middlemen you have the harder it is to coordinate everyone. 

David Graeber is not saying that all middlemen are bad. His thesis is that middleman jobs where the person who has the job believes the job is useless are bad. 

Someone who sits at SpaceX and first has to calculate the chance than Starship will land on a whale and kill the wale and then calculate the chance that it will land on various other endangered species and kill it, to then conclude that the chance isn't that high on the open ocean, is the kind of person who would say his job is "useless". That's what Graeber talks about with bullshit jobs. 

I have a friend who's employed at an state-owned investment bank for local building who's job it was to calculate ESG metrics for the bank and who thought he was doing what Graeber was describing. The metrics he calculated were not going to affect any decisions and likely the rules for the ESG metrics were going to change in a few years anyway. 

Ten people want to build a bridge. But they face problems: Who works on the foundation vs. the supports? How do we prevent the left side team from building something incompatible with the right side team? When is the foundation strong enough to start building on top? How do we know if we’re on track or behind schedule?

Today, ten people can't build a bridge because they need to involve a lot of middleman to deal with bureaucracy. Building a bridge was a lot cheaper 70 years when Robert Moses build his bridges. In the timeframe of the Great Stagnation, the necessity to involve a lot more middle men in creating a bridge was created and now we build a lot less bridges.

If you have a mathematician who needs to calculate the ESG metrics for the bridge building project before the bridge building project can be funded building bridges becomes harder. 

How can you align your efforts to improve future coordination?

Getting rid of middlemen is often a good way to do so. That's why NEPA reform is important. In health care it's why getting rid of pharmacy benefit managers is a good idea.

Understanding Northcote Parkinson's work about how bureaucracies grow middlemen and then the middlemen make up work for the middlemen to do is key.

The link also didn't work for me. The post is from the 31th of October 2015.