like 95% of my cognitive abilities apparently go to "accurately weighing the MANY variables that determine if a restaurant is good or sucks using a methodology that is very hard to verbalize"

— Faine Greenwood (@faineg) January 10, 2022

I am also great at finding good restaurants, but this skill very much applies to other things too. This isn’t an isolated capability and I think she is being humble/underselling herself.

To find a good restaurant one must evaluate multiple noisy signals, ignore what most people believe to be true and compensate for all the review tampering. One must also adjust for regional factors and preferences (for instance, where a lot of old people live, very terrible restaurants with plain food will tend to be spoken of highly).

How I find a good restaurant is exactly the same method I use to determine if an expert is bullshitting or lying, and how I figure out complex problems in my day job. These skills are inseparable. It’ll never be perfect, but I’ll take my 80-90% hit rate in all those fields over most people’s 0-10% any damn day.