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Comment by GVIrish | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that undermines his point at all. Experts can be wrong on things, experts can disagree, experts can change their position.

I think that's one of the big problems with how people are approaching experts in this climate. 'Dr. Fauci was wrong about that one thing, now I'm only going to listen to Dr. Oz!' We're in a weird place where people expect experts to be right 100% of the time in situations with murky or evolving information or in subjective calls. When experts are wrong people turn to people with no expertise who say things they like.

There's room to disagree with experts, there's room for experts to be wrong sometimes. But the problem is people lining up to follow people who have little to no expertise at all and elevating them over experts. Even worse, people are growing actively hostile to expertise when it advocates something that they don't like.

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Experts can be wrong, but there are limits. There has to be some line that a person can cross, whether through duplicity or ineptitude, that strips them of their status as “expert”, otherwise the term loses its meaning and we are talking about something more akin to a religious figure or royalty.

When someone is completely wrong on a matter that is central to their supposed expertise, and there are terrible consequences for humanity, they shouldn’t get a pass just because they went to Harvard or wrote some books or held important positions in the government. That doesn’t mean it’s better to listen to Dr. Oz instead, but it is better to find new experts to listen to.

I think when experts are wrong it negatively impacts their credibility. If they're wrong often enough, or wrong on something important enough, sometimes they lose enough credibility that people no longer solicit or listen to their input.

This may not happen often enough, but that is part of the scrutiny and accountability that should come part and parcel with being a renowned expert.

Dr Fauci spent the initial months of the pandemic telling people not to wear masks. We can rationalize why he did that, we can understand that experts make mistakes, but the end result was an undermining of public confidence when later the consensus in the liberal media switched to people who don't wear masks are stupid and selfish.

> When experts are wrong people turn to people with no expertise who say things they like.

That's right, and I think as you've hinted at they hold these people to a much lower standard than they hold the experts.

If Dr. Oz was wrong about one thing 6 months ago, that doesn't shake their belief in him the same way it did Dr. Fauci.

People hold authority to a much higher standard, or at least they should.

One quality an expert has is the willingness to admit that they were wrong in the past, but that their assessment was based on information they had available at the time.

In a way it is. The experts that say the truth exists. But people who gladly promote untruth keep getting promoted, keep getting n-th chances and there is no accountability. The latter win over the former in the market and Tom Nicholson is part of that issue.

Experts can also be corrupted.

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