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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

But that's just called research. If you want to learn about Sparta, it's pretty easy to find blog posts or reddit threads about what the best book is, or to find the multi-paragraph reviews on Amazon and Goodreads and see what they say, or professional book reviews of them.

So you absolutely do have a way of knowing. What you usually don't have a reliable way of knowing is how good of a teacher on Sparta a local history teacher happens to be. And the answer is usually, not good enough to write a book on it.

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> But that's just called research. If you want to learn about Sparta, it's pretty easy to find blog posts or reddit threads about what the best book is, or to find the multi-paragraph reviews on Amazon and Goodreads and see what they say, or professional book reviews of them.

> So you absolutely do have a way of knowing.

As long as you already know enough about Sparta to be able to tell whether those blog posts, Reddit threads, and Amazon and Goodreads reviews are legit or spam.

> What you usually don't have a reliable way of knowing is how good of a teacher on Sparta a local history teacher happens to be.

Are you saying you honestly can't think of a way to vet a local teacher? How about taking to their students?

> And the answer is usually, not good enough to write a book on it.

Which, coincidentally, can be said for most authors as well, but that doesn't stop them from writing a book and then flooding the internet with blog posts, Reddit threads, and Amazon and Goodreads reviews about how good it is.

> As long as you already know enough about Sparta to be able to tell whether those blog posts, Reddit threads, and Amazon and Goodreads reviews are legit or spam.

Nope, it's more of just a generalized credibility/bullshit detector. It has zero to do with the topic at hand. This is a major life skill that is important to develop.

> Are you saying you honestly can't think of a way to vet a local teacher? How about taking to their students?

You can figure out if they're good at teaching as a general skill (although contacting a bunch of students who are willing to take the time to talk to you is a lot of work). It's quite difficult to suss out their actual knowledgeability, however. For example, you can find a local moral philosophy professor who is well-liked, but who will teach everything through a lens of Kantianism and disparage consequentialism and never even mention virtue ethics. And you could spend 50 hours of private tutoring and never know you were receiving major bias and being left with huge gaps -- something unlikely to happen if you spent the same time carefully reading a couple of well-respected intro textbooks on the subject.

> ...and then flooding the internet...

See above about credibility/bullshit detection. Remember, don't look at average stars or anything like that, look for posts/reviews that go in-depth where you can tell the reviewer knows what they're talking about, and then look for consistent commonalities between posts.

> Nope, it's more of just a generalized credibility/bullshit detector. It has zero to do with the topic at hand. This is a major life skill that is important to develop.

I guess the same detector hasn't been developed well enough to apply to teachers promoting themselves. That's a shame, generalizing is an important life skill to develop.

No, the detector is the same, it's just that you usually don't have hundreds of people reviewing local teachers, including well-known expert reviewers, in the way that you can find hundreds of reviews for individual books. There needs to be enough data to find the signal in the noise.

And even when you do, you should still remember that almost anyone can find and have access to a world-class book, while you're quite unlikely to have a world-class expert locally to teach you.

> where you can tell the reviewer knows what they're talking about

I do not believe this is possible. Sure, you can tell if the reviewer thinks he knows what he is talking about, and that some internet people agree with him, but you cannot judge whether he is really correct unless you are already a subject matter expert.

> If you want to learn about Sparta, it's pretty easy to find

Oh god. Why Sparta? Why this particular historiographical can of worms, where the history of the history is far more convoluted than the history of Lacedaemon itself?

No. Someone without a pretty solid knowledge of Ancient Greek history and historiography and the skills to be able to track the changes in the research literature is going to have a damn hard time finding the best book on Sparta.

Finding the search terms is half the search. If you already know "Sparta", you're past that stage.

Or, by Douglas Adams, knowing the question is pretty important.

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