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Comment by Veen | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that the layperson sees experts being wrong all the time. From the doctor who misdiagnosed their cousin, to the epidemiological modelling that turned out incapable of making accurate predictions, to entire fields of apparent bullshit like social psychology. They also see credentialed experts vociferously disagreeing about the truth of important matters. They watch news reports that tell them meat causes cancer and that you should eat red meat to reduce your chances of getting cancer. They read news articles telling them cloth masks will save your life and that cloth masks are useless.

People are bombarded with contradictory expert advice, so it's hardly surprising that they decide experts don't know what they hell they're talking about.

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I see what you mean, and I think it's about expectations.

1.) Most of us are trained to have to expect to defer to authority, because that's what today's school teaches, due to the commodification and artificial scarcity of science, and to the division of labor of our profit-seeking economic system.

2.) They expect not to be able to understand things in depth, because capital controls the amount of knowledge workers that are 'allowed' to reach expert status, so as to control the labor supply of knowledge workers.

I expect to have to defer to authority because I recognise that it's infeasible for me personally to accumulate the total sum of human knowledge and experience. It might have been different in Galileo's day.

The epidemiological modeling actually did not turned out all that bad. The expectation of perfect accuracy would be unreasonable to begin with. But the models I have seen clearly stated assumptions and goals. And within those parameters generally did not do that badly.

You really need to go into political manipulations of them - like taking worst case scenario model and claiming it was wrong because situation was not worst case.

In general, a totally agree with you. I was thinking specifically of Neil Ferguson in the UK, who has a history of loudly promoting the worst possible outcomes based on opaque models others in the field have described as an unreliable buggy mess. Yet his data and models were at the forefront of the argument against any relaxation of lockdown or mask wearing rules (all while he was flagrently flouting lockdown to conduct an affair). People like that do not give the general public confidence in the reliability of experts.

But they do love to follow “experts“ who recommend malaria medication and horse dewormer as cure against COVID. At the same time, blindly following a different group of people is somehow branded as being “independent thinking” and “not being a sheep”. Brillant!

You're unnecessarily narrowing this conversation to focus on a political group you don't like. I'm not interested in that.

Thank you for the heads up, I will always keep that in mind whenever I write another comment.

Let's not forget that you brought politics into this, not me. Let's not forget that I did not talk about who I like at all. Finally, let's not forget that this group, that you (not me) associate with a political side, is performing mass suicide by following TV personalities rather than experts, accepting massive collateral damage to others. Hundreds of thousands are dead, more than died in the Civil War, hundreds of thousands could have been saved had one not taken medical and epidemiological advice from TV personalities.

>>>But they do love to follow “experts“ who recommend malaria medication and horse dewormer as cure against COVID

Not to be confused with the FDA...which approved horse steroids for COVID treatment[1][2] at the same time it was lambasting the population via its Twitter account for taking horse dewormer. This sort of conflicting messaging is again why people are ignoring "experts".

[1]https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavi... [2]https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/never-say-neigh-fda-lists...

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