Whose Opinion Counts?

Pierre Teo · Published 30 June 2026 · Mental models

There seem to be two different kinds of claims a critic can make, and they call for quite different credentials.

The first is this is bad as an experience. For this, being a practitioner doesn't really matter — you don't need to be a chef to know the fish is spoiled, or to have built an iPhone to notice the camera overexposes skin tones. The consumer is the final authority on their own experience, and a good critic is essentially a professional consumer: someone who has experienced hundreds of restaurants or phones and can articulate and compare. That's real expertise — expertise in judging, not making.

The second is here's why it's bad, here's what they should have done, here's how easy this was. This is where things get shakier. Diagnosing the cause and prescribing the fix seems to require practitioner knowledge. "They should just do X, it's obvious" is easy to say when you've never had to make the tradeoffs yourself.

The quotes below are all, in one way or another, about telling these two apart — and about noticing what a confident voice actually has at stake before letting it persuade us.

Steve Jobs on advice without ownership#

From a talk at MIT Sloan in 1992, during his NeXT years, after a student asked about going into consulting. Nothing inherently wrong with it, he says — but without owning something over an extended period of time,

where one has a chance to take responsibility for one's recommendations, where one has to see one's recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes and pick oneself up off the ground,

you only ever learn a fraction of what you could — "you do get a broad cut at companies, but it's very thin." Then the metaphor: consulting is like having a picture of a banana on the wall instead of eating one. The picture might be very accurate, but it's only two-dimensional.

Without the experience of actually doing it, you never get three-dimensional.

You can end up with a wall full of pictures to show off — worked in bananas, worked in peaches, worked in grapes — and never have tasted one.

The word that stays with me is scar tissue. The complaint isn't that advisors lack knowledge — it's that they've never been punished by reality for a bad recommendation. They advise, they leave, and someone else lives with the consequences.

Nassim Taleb on skin in the game#

Skin in the Game is the modern intellectual home of that complaint. The core idea: be wary of advice from someone who doesn't bear the consequences of being wrong. Consultants, pundits, and forecasters — Taleb's word is fragilistas — collect upside from sounding smart with little downside for bad calls.

Don't tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio.

Brandolini's law is adjacent:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

Criticism is cheap; building is expensive. The asymmetry goes some way to explaining the ecosystem.

The risk sits with the builder#

Theodore Roosevelt, "Citizenship in a Republic" (1910):

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again... who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.

Anton Ego's closing review in Ratatouille — Pixar handing the confession to the critic himself:

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment.

To be fair, his next line is the steelman: the critic does risk something in the discovery and defense of the new. A critic serving the audience — looking out for their money, their time, their attention — is doing real work. So this isn't a case against criticism as such; it's about being alert to unaccountable diagnosis.

George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, meaner (and spoken by a character, in a book of deliberately provocative maxims — so perhaps take it with salt):

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

And Sibelius, as recounted by his student Bengt de Törne:

Remember, a statue has never been set up in honour of a critic!

Plato on eloquence#

The oldest version of the problem. The Sophists taught rhetoric — how to win arguments and sound convincing regardless of truth. Plato's objection: persuasiveness and truth are independent variables, and skilled speakers exploit our tendency to conflate them. Lawyers are trained in a tradition descended from the Sophists.

The modern names for that tendency are the halo effect — we assume articulate means correct — and verbal fluency bias. Compressed: eloquence is not evidence.

This matters here because articulating is the critic's craft. A professional articulator will often sound more convincing than a builder mid-struggle, even on topics where the builder knows more. The polish is part of the product.

Gell-Mann amnesia, or: why bad critics survive#

Michael Crichton, describing an effect he named after his physicist friend Murray Gell-Mann:

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well... You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward... In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate.

This might be the mechanism that keeps low-quality diagnosis in business. We rarely get to check a commentator's judgment against measurable reality — predictions are vague, diagnoses hard to falsify, and by the time anything resolves, everyone has moved on. So the rare moments when a critic's judgment is cleanly testable — a concrete prediction, or something they shipped themselves — carry a lot of information. Those moments are easy to let slide by. They're worth holding onto: one verified miss in a domain you can check is a useful signal about the domains you can't.

A small filter to carry around#

All of the above compresses into three questions worth asking of any confident voice:

1. What kind of claim is this? A report of an experience ("the battery died by 2pm," "the fish was spoiled") or a diagnosis with a prescription ("they should obviously have done X")? The first mostly requires honesty and taste. The second leans on practitioner knowledge — worth a moment to ask whether they have any.

2. What do they lose if they're wrong? Scar tissue, portfolio, reputation staked on falsifiable calls — or nothing much? A voice that does equally well whether it's right or wrong has little reason to be right, only to be interesting.

3. Am I persuaded by the content or the delivery? A practical way to check: try restating the argument in your own plain words, without the phrasing that carried it. If it still holds up, it was the content. If it suddenly sounds thin, a lot of the work was being done by the delivery.

And also keep loose score. When a commentator makes a checkable claim, circle back to it later. A take that resonates just means it says what we already think, put well. Whether the person tends to be right is a separate question — and their record answers it.