"Don't go against the experts"

There is this idea that if the experts say X you shouldn’t go against them. What if it harms others other than you if you do? What if it harms the innocent?

The explicit and often explict claim is that one should go along with the experts, period. Well, let’s look at this heuristic in actual contexts and see if it holds up in some universal way.

Before getting to contexts, it is important to note that one is general offered a variety of expert opinions, so what this heuristic actually boils down to is follow the marjority expert opinion as presented in the major media. They are often minority position experts also, and these inform the choices of people who decide to go against the majority opinion. People may also make decisions based on their own research, relevent personal experience, insight into who has control of information, insight into paradigmatic and political biases that may affect majority opinions and more.

1. Experts were direct and extreme racists in many countries pre (and post) abolition. Does this mean that if you were against slavery or pro-interracial marriage or believed in the equal rights of all races, you were dangerously going against the experts and therefore wrong? Could one not have been informed by direct experience, minority experts (in both senses of ‘minority’), awareness of political and economic bias in the experts, etc. and have arrived at a position different from the majority position?
2. Likewise expert opinion in preWW2 Germany on Jews.
3. Scientific consensus pre 1965, say, was that animals might not be experiencers, have emotions, intentions and so on. That was scientific consensus. In fact any scientist who in professional contexts wrote and spoke as if we knew animals were like us conscious creatures and not complicated machines would actually have their career damaged. If one went against this expert consensus - based on personal expertience of animals, other experts like many animal trainers, and so on - was one necessarily wrong? Was it a lucky mistake or could one have noted the paradigmatic bias within the majority experts in science and drawn a completely rational dissenting opinion?
4. The vietnam war. Expert opinion: politicians, pundits, newspapers liberal and conservative were all in favor of the Vietnam war, until they weren’t. The domino theory and other ideas about the dangers of Communism etc, were put forward by experts to say the war was necessary. Going against these experts could harm innocent people, including children. However some people disagreed, based on their interpretations of history and morality and the information they had about Vietnam. There were a few minority experts and then also people with political reasons for opposing the war. If one decided on supported them one was breaking the implicit rule a number of people here put forward: that if one goes against majority experts and it might harm a child or an innocent or others, than one is immoral.
5. Many parents, in the recent decades radical overmedicating of children who supposed have chemical imbalances or syndromes, decided on other approaches (diet, supplementation, therapy, pedagogical shift, changes in parenting and more) rather than medicate their children. Were they necessarily wrong because they went against majority expert opinion? Could they not possibly have noticed how pharmaceutical company desires affect media, that expert opinion can be bought, that there are paradigmatic biases involved, and so on?

Now in my experience with this last example people will then come up with counter examples where parents made mistakes going against medical advice. Well, duh, welcome to reality. I am not saying GO AGAINST MAJORITY EXPERT OPINION. That is another poor heuristic and likely everyone here, even those you consider irrational do what majority experts advise on some or likely many issues. People are so binary in their thinking that if you argue that heuristic X is a limited one, then you must be saying always to the opposite of X.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOo.

And welcome to the real world. It’s harder than that. You have too look at specfic issues and contexts. You need a flexible set of heuristics. You need to take responsibility. And yes, you may make mistakes. And just as a Jehovahs witness may refused a transfusion for their child and cause a death and you think this somehow shows one should always follow majority expert advice, other parents have blindly followed majority expert advice and fucked their children up. Or gone along with policies that fucked over drafted soldiers and Vietnamese children. Or that ran nations or certain groups into early graves.

This is hard stuff.

If only life were so fucking easy. How fucking responsibilitiless easy. Life is much more fucking hard than these peopel who imply but often don’t have the courage to say that we should go along with majority expert opinion or we are bad, especially if some innocent gets hurt.

We can pretend that what is presented as the majority expert opinion is always 1) something that should be followed, period and 2) is actually the majority opinion. Or we could realize that paradigmatic biases, corporate and political biases, media biases and power biases can be noted, researched and weighed, along with personal experiences, minority expert arguments and data, censored data, historical patterns, to arrive
rationally at different stands.
Does this mean one will always be right?
No.
But going along with majority opinion is no guarante either. This is fucking hard adult decision-making shit.

In my examples above I chose examples that were aimed more at the Left, since I see this argument put forward, here at least, more by the Left. I could come up with examples more suited to challenge people on the right who think one should always follow majority expert advice and opinion.

Many of us have experienced the dark side of majority expert positions: could be in wars, in mental health approaches, in corporate practice, in courtroom processes, in the various wars on things like drugs or terror. We have learned that just because experts even a strong majority say X is true and scientifically backed, it need not be correct (or actually scientifically backed).

We have lived this. We know that to follow that lazy ass heuristic is not being a full adult. And yes, mistakes may be made. But that’s what it is like being an adult in society. Yes, if you go along in all cases with majority expert positions you can blame them when you it goes to hell and feel proud when it goes well. But others, often people you actually admire, took minority opinions, against majority experts.

Authoritarianism has to begin somewhere. “Don’t knock until you’ve tried it size=50[/size]”.

The truth of the matter whether people want to see it is that science has always been political throughout history and this is definitely true in our fallacious period of misguided technological progressivism.

In religion the narrative is finding salvation through the priest class and this is the same with science concerning scientists.

In religion the narrative is heaven on earth or in death, with science it is creating a technological social utopia either here on earth or elsewhere.

While this is true, it’s not fair to ascribe it to science, or the other one to religion. Only some religions. And only pseudo-science.

Really it’s communism. They realized they turn people off with all the red sickle bullshit so they dress it up in the death of pretty flowers and Kurtzweilian immortality.

The odd thing is that people knock authorities or respect people who did in the past, but when it comes to now or on certain issues, they simply cannot entertain some healthy skepticism. It’s like the old criticism of conservatives: every conservative worships a dead radical. Probably many liberal have laughed smugly at this critique. But then they go right out and ignore the people they worship often were radically skeptical of then current experts.

good post karp
i have been feeling more than ever
the need to be judicious
when taking in assertions
made in layman literature
with reference to scientific publications
i think it’s the job of every scientist
to question the conclusions reached by research
it used to be that the “discussion” part of the paper
was the longest and where the bulk of the thinking went
nowadays I have been seeing minimal and barely existent discussions
and so many of them fail to acknowledge the limitations of their method
it’s like the conclusion part is ready
and then they just need to put something together to fill the rest of the paper
also what’s up with the method coming last??
it’s almost like the research team doesn’t want us to know how they got there
it’s so weird
i feel like things have changed a lot since i was in that scene
and it’s not a good change

Sound familiar? It ought to. After all, it’s not all that far removed from my own assessment of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.

Only for KT, he has this “visceral, intuitive, deep-down-inside-him” Self that is able to settle things when the conflicts he notes in the OP can result in different experts saying different things.

Take this one for example:

Is he actually arguing that in regard to the global conflict between capitalism and Communism some experts back then were more equal than others? That there really was a way to grasp the most rational conclusion regarding U.S. involvement in Vietnam?!

I was there. Drafted to fight the war. Now when I went there I sided with the “experts” who said that stopping the Communists was the most fundamental mission of the free world. America may have fucked up the “means” but the “end” was no less righteous.

Then after my year in that MACV in Song Be, I came home believing the “experts” on the other side. That Communism was actually the future.

Then my moral and political objectivism crumbled into moral and political nihilism. Into my fractured and fragmented “I”.

But: What is KT’s reaction to that war? How is he not fractured and fragmented himself given a No God, no objective morality frame of mind. Just like mine.

How exactly does he explain his “visceral, intuitive, deep-down-inside-him” Self’s revulsion to one or the other side’s point of view.

Oh, and if my favorite word is “dasein”, his has to be “heuristic”:

A heuristic technique, or a heuristic…is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal or approximation. Where finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical, heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision. wiki

You know, being “pragmatist”. Somehow in embodying this “technique” intertwined in his “visceral, intuitive, deep-down-inside-him” Self, he is able to avoid feeling fractured and fragmented.

That’s all I want to explore with him.

And since science itself discovered that who funded the research, even in, for example, double blind studies, affects the results, even when it seems everyone is professional to the bone at a conscious level, one has to be careful even of the direct research itself. And Gates has not only funded media related to vaccine’s, he’s funded the WHO, and also all sorts of scientific research centers. For example.

I didn’t know that. IOW the researchers, even with positive results, took some care to cover factors that might have skewed their results and perhaps what future trials should be careful to control?

Does this mean you were/are a scientist?

Most of the so called experts on television are not experts on anything, zero credentials, just a pretty face or some slug in a business suit. Just a bunch of overpaid snake oils men or political propagandists.

Experts have often been wrong.
Relatively how much more wrong have non-experts been? And how much more often?

If you want to know something about a subject, who do you ask? An expert? Or some random person off the street?

If you go against an expert, who are you? How much expertise on the subject do you actually have to inform you better than than an expert?
Obviously this is a problematic question to ask many people, especially those with ego and/or stupidity and/or education issues. So many people don’t even know how to identify legitimate criteria to evaluate such a comparison, they don’t know what constitutes valid evidence, they don’t know how to recognise and account for any biases or offset any agendas that they have on a personal level - look no further than this forum for a complete demonstration. Should we ask people here what they think on specialist subjects? Sure, but should we listen to them? Should we go against an argument they lay out that they think is fantastic and flawless? Maybe, but if the matter is of consequence, I’d certainly rather listen to someone who actually knows what they’re talking about first, wouldn’t you?

Experts are going to be wrong. A lot.
But is it literally as much of a coin-toss as asking a non-expert? Should we ask an expert whether it is or hear the opinion of a non-expert?

I’m completely against any culture of distrust in science, but obviously I understand distrust in how its findings are filtered through media/politicians. But is that the fault of science and expertise, or media and politicians?
And WHY is the media so unreliable?
It’s trying to make money off the general public, the vast majority of whom are non-experts - and most of whom just buy into what they want to hear.
The problem is in the incentive to cater to popular subjectivity and not reality-tested objectivity.
But that’s what a market economy does.
Capitalist media is a terrible way to communicate science and expert opinion - and we blame the experts?

Be honest - most of the time people don’t like expert opinion is when it goes against their own.
It’s a problem that we often don’t know who these experts are, but let’s face it - even if everyone did, that wouldn’t give the vast majority of people any more idea about the methods they used to arrive at their conclusions, and even if every single paper was made available to the public, a tiny minority would actually read them, and even less would be able to understand them. So to most people it’s just going to sound like a politically influenced opinion, even when it isn’t - especially because conclusions are often going to back up one political party over another. The non-aligned with said party will then just switch off and go against the experts out of loyalty, dismissing anyone else who listens as mindless sheep.

The problem with science is that it’s basically authoritarian - evidence and logic being the authority. Most people don’t like being told what to do - especially if it goes against what they want to do.
The less we know about a situation, the more we defer to experts to guide the seemingly most rational way forward.
They’ll likely be wrong, and yes that will suck, but at least the most informed people were consulted, and at least it will benefit science to add the results to the whole process of gaining even more knowledge about the world what to do in future. More of a problem than experts are people who think they know better when they objectively don’t - and it seems like education has become less and less respected over the decades, in favour of “showing off your amazing revolutionary (insufficiently informed) opinion that goes against all the experts because you’re so special that you’re going to change/save the world without needing to put in any effort like all those academic chumps who progressed where you failed to, and therefore didn’t want to anyway, it was education’s fault and not yours”.

You didn’t respond to the points raised in the OP. It’s not anti-science. It does not suggest making a coin toss. It mentions that most people, even those skeptical about experts on certain issues will follow experts much or most of the time. And if your insults weren’t aimed at anyone here explicitly, then they’re off topic. If it was aimed at people here, then it’s ad hom.

Note to Pedro and observ:

Looks like he means it this time in regard to experts.

still
even though money interests always throw a shade of bias onto things
the publications keep a lot of that stuff in check
and they ought to be idoneous
there is a level of scrutiny to pass through editors and peer-review
that must hold up against any pressure
though we’re seeing more and more
how tenured professors and such
people with a ridiculous background of scientific honors
can be bullied into submitting to pressure
form things like a tweet that displeased the masses
how has it come to be
that people in administrative positions
fucking paper stampers
hired by universities to pander to social justice warriors
to create fucking safe spaces where you can’t state scientific facts
lest it hurts someone
are the becoming the ultimate authority on what a scientist can publish?
it’s like a new kind of dark ages

yes absolutely
and when a team fails to do that
peer-reviewers are supposed to point them out to them
and the criticism from the peer-reviewers has to be addressed in the discussion
so the limitations and blind spots of a model become things to take into consideration
when reading the paper

but politicians and news editors aren’t going to bring any of these things up
they’re just going to say that ~science~ has determined that such and such is 90% accurate

ages ago
i worked as a researcher for a year
and started a masters in microbiology
but i dropped it to work with biomechanics instead
and then shortly after that i moved to the US and started to work with software
so basically i was going that way
but then nah
i did publish a paper though

Sure, and I am not saying that we should abandon research or experts - in my own personal experience it often boils down to a choice BETWEEN experts, however much I have to weigh my sense of the historical period and its biases. But the problem is on the one hand subtler than editors can deal with. The results are affected even with the good intentions of researchers. And we don’t know yet all the reasons for this. And then also, it depends a lot on the field. Like the science around psychotropic medicines is saturated with paradigmatic and monied biases. The science around the make-up of comets and bot fly physiology much less so. Some of this editors can deal with, but some even affects what is studied and what is never looked at. Some of it goes beyond the philosophical skills of most editors.

Again, this surely happens, but they can even be acting in good faith. Just funding itself creates bias even when we can find no protocol bias. But further controlling paradigms happens in ways that editors can not tease out of a handed in paper.

Sure, though the monied interests have been skewing things for a long time.

yes absolutely
and when a team fails to do that
peer-reviewers are supposed to point them out to them
and the criticism from the peer-reviewers has to be addressed in the discussion
so the limitations and blind spots of a model become things to take into consideration
when reading the paper

but politicians and news editors aren’t going to bring any of these things up
they’re just going to say that ~science~ has determined that such and such is 90% accurate

ages ago
i worked as a researcher for a year
and started a masters in microbiology
but i dropped it to work with biomechanics instead
and then shortly after that i moved to the US and started to work with software
so basically i was going that way
but then nah
i did publish a paper though
[/quote]

Care to share the title or topic?

it was on developing a method to quantify the properties of different types of polymers
when it comes to their ability to delay or prevent the growth of bacterial biofilms
which are a common problem for long term intensive care patients
nosocomial infections are a bitch

I didn’t quote any of the OP body because I wasn’t addressing any of the specific points.

As for being off-topic, I was ranting about the attitude of “don’t go against the experts” in general.

As for insults, it’s more of a true observation that many people suffer from ego/stupidity/education issues (yourself not included) - though I guess it’s an insult to point out that many other posters on this forum do suffer from the aforementioned ailments, and to them I mean the insult. Just my opinion, though it’s fact that they do nothing to further constructive philosophical discourse.

As for ad hom, my point is not that the egotistical/stupid/uneducated are wrong because of these traits - my point is that experts are more likely to be right. This isn’t even an appeal to authority fallacy either because I’m not saying their expertise makes them right, I’m saying that more legitimate study informs experts better than non-experts and that if one wants to benefit from this, one would likely do better being guided by it as opposed to non-experts.

Nothing controversial here - though I appreciate that it can be irritating when someone has a general rant on your thread, without specifically addressing what you as the creator of the thread have taken the time and effort to write.
On that account, forgive me - I don’t think you have much course to discuss my post with me so by all means continue with your own points. I’ve offered my two cents.

You were right to call me out, my apologies.

Weren’t you ranting about the attitude ‘don’t go with the experts’?

Thanks, accepted.

You shouldn’t go along with anything unless you genuinely think you should go along with it. So if you don’t think you should listen to experts, don’t.

The alternative is to retire your brain and let someone else make your decisions.

And what if it happens that you’re wrong and that experts are right?

That’s the price you have to pay if you want to learn.

Noone gets it right the first time.

The pressure being too high, I wouldn’t be surprised if most if not all people end up retiring their brains (:

I thought only the naive and innocent generally hold this idea. Isnt’ that the old appeal to authority? one of the many common logical fallacies. I mean maybe its just me, maybe I’m an exception to the rule , maybe i’m " paranoid" or "cynical "or not “open enough” or whatever X wanna label me. But everybody is fallible , expert or no expert. Right? that’s gotta be the default position, when it comes to dealing with “truth”, or you’re gonna get bamboozled.