>I'd say that believing experts is more an act of philosophy than an act of science.
Not philosophy. Faith.
Not philosophy. Faith.
I'd love to hear a couple examples of which "expert opinions" you've disproven for yourself and where you acquired the supporting evidence.
Still, an expert, by definition is just someone that has "comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of a subject." You could argue that as soon as you've acquired enough knowledge on a subject to form an accurate opinion, you have yourself become an expert.
Although I'm guessing when you're referring to "experts" you mean "establishment experts." For example, your average doctor whose spent decades studying medicine as opposed to your online research on how to best treat/prevent a certain ailment (you didn't provide an example so I am just referring a fairly common one). What's the difference between your expertise and theirs? On one hand, they have decades worth of rigorous academic study and personal experience over you, on the other hand, you may have a "fresher" perspective that may be devoid of certain institutional biases. I would just strive to stay humble.
I have one that's related to nutrition. But what's the point if you don't do it yourself, how will you know if I'm right?
Not quite. It's observation of the world around you. It doesn't preclude experts' opinions, it takes them into account. Reinventing the wheel isn't the goal of science. The goal is to understand why a circle might be the best shape for rolling and under what circumstances it might not be.
More specific to current times, ignoring the advice of epidemiologists with respect to masks and social distancing is proving to be costly in life and economy.
"In my experience, whenever I have to rely on an expert opinion I usually feel bad later when I acquire more knowledge in the area myself, as those opinions are almost always wrong."
Care to share a specific example from your life?
It feels like one of those things in philosophy that religious people greatly exaggerate the importance of.
How you choose to "solve" it is up to you.
The solution computer scientists like a lot is coherentism. You pull yourself up by the bootstraps - like we do with self-hosting compilers.
Of course, it's just a conceptual game (like all philosophy). The idea of "prove to me that you know..." seems a bit like "Jump for me... Higher!"
Appropriately named then!
(I personally am very aggressively areligious, so "faith" here does not necessarily refer to a spiritual faith.)
We need a much different concept than faith.
Faith means continuing to believe something that is massively contrary to the evidence, to preserve some type of fidelity or loyalty to a previous belief commitment.
I think this is massively different than acknowledging the fundamental deductive limitations of reasoning about epistemic metatruths.
You've just defined faith in a way that wins your argument, but that is not any kind of consensus definition of faith.
The ubiquitous notion of religious faith is similar to the second thing, and is not similar to the first thing. It’s not a matter of consensus or definition.
The hypothesis "Expert consensus is more likely to be correct" is falsifiable and thus not purely blind faith
That's one of those things that sounds like it should be falsifiable, but in practice it's not. The statement is far too broad to conduct reasonable experiments, and if you narrow the scope to the point where you can conduct experiments, then your experiments won't support a conclusion that's broad enough to be a sound foundation for "expert consensus is more likely to be correct".
I happen to think expert consensus is generally useful, but there's still an element of faith in my opinion.
The consolidated statement is way to wide, but if you take consensus to mean "a large majority like 66%+ portion of the scientific literature within the field(s) relevant to that specific instance" that becomes a lot more testable for an individual issue.
That's exactly my point.
>if you take consensus to mean "a large majority like 66%+ portion of the scientific literature within the field(s) relevant to that specific instance" that becomes a lot more testable for an individual issue.
Yeah we can say that for some specific issue like choosing what time of year to plant tomatoes, expert consensus is useful, but that doesn't generalize, which was also my point.
It’s like a chain of custody in legal evidence. If someone presents evidence in court and states that there are logs, seals and timestamps proving the chain of custody and disproving tampering, it is not “an act of faith” to believe the evidence was preserved accurately, even though you only observe details about the chain of custody, not the state of the evidence itself at all times.
It’s similar with expert opinion. You can think of the evidence (which you don’t personally observe) as passing through a series of chain of custody transactions - initial data collection, data preparation, actual study or research, proposed models, fact checking and testing correctness, presentation of results, use in an application / prototype / clinical trial, etc.
Believing in the fidelity of this chain of events is itself amenable to scientific and inductive inquiry.
Just like some rare case where police or attorneys lied about chain of custody with evidence that did get tampered with, sometimes this model of continuing trust at each step of the chain is wrong. Sometimes the chain of events that led to an expert opinion is untrustworthy - someone falsified data or lied, or there was an undetected error.
But that means it is a statistical process with an error rate, not that it contains any aspect similar to faith.
I mean, philosophically, both sides have good points about fundamental flaws of the other.
I believe that kangaroos are real. If there were suddenly overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I would say okay and start believing that they probably aren't real, not stay firm in the original belief and dismiss the new evidence as a test of my faith.