Ruth Porat, pictured above, is the president and chief investment officer of Alphabet and Google, and she propounds a "Quark Test," as a way to decide whether or not someone who has an opinion "knows what they're talking about."
Following is what Porat has to say about that topic, as she has expressed herself in an article in The Wall Street Journal Magazine, outlining her "Quark Test" idea (emphasis added):
A Savvy Leader Has A Fine-Tuned B.S. Detector. Do You?My father, who was a physicist, said if someone can’t define a quark in less than 30 seconds, they don’t know what they’re talking about. Throughout my career, I have used the quark test. If you think something adds value, at Alphabet, or at Morgan Stanley, and you can’t tell me why in a compelling way in less than 30 seconds, then you don’t know what you’re talking about.
I think that there is a lot of truth in what Porat says. If you truly do know "what you're talking about," you should be able to tell someone else about it in a very brief (maybe even 30-second) statement. However, it has been my own experience that a person will often arrive at "knowing what they are talking about" by actually talking about the topic - "talking it out."
Arriving at "the truth," or finding the right thing to do (or think), is not something one does unilaterally, and it usually requires more than 30 seconds. Making a correct decision about "the truth," or about what to say, or do, is almost always the product of a discussion with other people. The "truth" is almost never one's own, first-thought idea, defined in that 30-second statement that Porat is suggesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Porat
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