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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> Pointing out that a researcher has no scientific training and is working out of a strip-mall university is not an ad hominem

Yeah, both of those are ad hominem.

> Science is driven by expertise,

No, science is driven by methodology, including criticism that avoids appeal to authority and other personal characteristics of researchers to focus on the objective characteristics of the work.

> and non-expert opinion is correctly regarded as less reliable than expert opinion

Science isn't opinion-based.

> non-expert opinion is correctly regarded as less reliable than expert opinion - that isn't an ad hominem, it's the correct method for dealing with any domain requiring expertise.

It is ad hominem (argument to personal qualities of the proponent of the position rather than directly to the merits of the position), whether or not you view it as correct.

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Sounds like OP is a proponent of scientism -- where the authority of scientists and their opinions form the basis of a worldview.

Scientists aren't priests. Once they become that, for one, science itself is in danger of stagnation.

> science is driven by methodology

There are numerous tweets pointing out how poor the researchers' methodology is, e.g.:

https://twitter.com/MTB_Archaeology/status/14404733356876308...

> including criticism that avoids appeal to authority

Those researchers work at a "University" whose motto is literally "Flexible Adult Higher Education Upholding Biblical Authority".

A magnificent rebuttal. People bemoan the "lack of trust in science" -- but any "science" that acts like this is not science at all.

I think a genuine "trust in science" (i.e. in the method alone) manifests itself primarily as a desire to learn about the world first-hand. "Why does this happen?" "Let's make an experiment and see if we can find out!"

I'm not just talking about kids. All of us would do well to keep an objective mindset, experiment, and hold opinions lightly enough to change them when the data tells us otherwise.

Ironically, this kind of trust also causes us to question the opinions and conclusions of scientists, wanting to replicate their experiments or look at studies with similar subject areas—because it's the method we trust, not the (imperfect) people who are practicing it.

On the other hand, people bemoaning a "lack of trust in science" are (perhaps unwittingly) encouraging people to look to scientists like they might have to priests in bygone eras.

Science is driven by methodology, but requires participants to be trained in that methodology to participate meaningfully. The criticism of these folks was that they were never trained in that methodology, which the continuing criticisms of their work show well- they used many methodologically unreliable analyses in their paper because they had no idea what they were doing since they weren't trained as scientists.

When looking at science not as some hypothetical ideal in the Philosophy of Science, but in terms of what is actually practiced, science is a domain where expert opinion matters a great deal and in the real world it plays a significant part in how scientific claims are weighed which is good since equally weighing all claims would make the entire enterprise hopeless. If pointing out that someone's not an expert while weighing in on a topic requiring expertise is an ad hominem, then ad hominems are actually a reliable and veridical form of reasoning. It's rational to protest a drunk stranger with no training taking the controls of a flying jet.

On discussion forums people care about experts because their opinion carries more weight. But this is not how science is done. When describing an experiment you lay out your methods and steps. If there are mistakes in those mehods others will point them out. If there are no mistakes you accept the results. Since in science we have this direct way of evaluating the made claims there is no need to use proxies like "trusting the experts". Accusing someone of not being an expert, if everything they did was correct, makes no sense. And if they did something wrong you criticise that, and not their expert status.

In the real world scientists do look at claims by others, consider if those people are actually domain-specific experts in the area they are making claims in, and judge accordingly every day. You're thinking about some imaginary ideal of science that isn't practiced in the world.

> In the real world scientists do look at claims by others, consider if those people are actually domain-specific experts in the area they are making claims in, and judge accordingly every day.

Individual scientists are people and they do what they wish. They have friends, enemies, biases, bad personality traits, and temper tantrums. Some may also believe in voodoo, karma, or reincarnation. But this is not part of science, these are just traits of the individual.

This is the same about rejecting something because the author is "not an expert". Individuals might do it, but it has no place in peer review or other form of official commentary.

It's not just individual scientists (who certainly aren't going to seriously entertain every crank they encounter - that would be insane), but institutions that hire based on expertise, consider which papers to print based on expertise, and so on. In science & other expertise-driven fields we assess competence & credibility when hiring, judging proposals, tenure, awards, research, etc. CVs & history are relevant and considered. That's the way an institutional expertise-driven domain like the sciences works.

In your world Einstein doesn't exist.

Einstein exists - he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and was a part of the institutional science of his day which was very much driven by showing expertise to gain attention from the established figures or start a career as a researcher - they don't accept walk-ups consults from strangers at universities, but most especially not at the IAS.

You're right, and this pseudo-scientific approach is one of the major reasons that there is now such widespread distrust of supposed experts. Way too often people catch them turning a blind eye to clearly invalid methodologies because it came from a peer, or refusing to acknowledge claims or criticisms because it came from outside their little clique. This is not behaviour we want to encourage or tolerate.

Whatever discipline you're working in, you could invite uninformed strangers to educate you about your job and your field for a while and see how that goes. Experts benefit from their expertise which include being taken seriously when discussing those areas of expertise (as well as being able to get jobs in specialized fields).

Expertise is a good thing, it's because we encourage it that the world works as well as it does. We don't really have a meritocracy, but by moving scientific institutions towards judging, selecting, and hiring based on expertise, they've done better than in the past when there was more nepotism and favors at many research universities. Granting the benefit of the doubt to those who have proven themselves able to do the work is rational, to grant the benefit of the doubt to random people regarding their expertise is deeply foolish.

As a programmer who has worked in enterprise, financial contexts and a big tech firm, I can assure you I have never been lacking in random non-programmers "educating" me about how to do my job, sometimes through the medium of passing regulations that don't make any technical sense. The idea that experts don't get interfered with normally is an academic idea, a projection of for they think the world works everywhere.

But fundamentally you're still conflating terms. Many people presented as experts by the academy, media and governments turn out on close inspection to not have actually proven themselves able to do the work! They are "experts" and "scientists" but not experts or scientists.

> Science is driven by methodology, but requires participants to be trained in that methodology to participate meaningfully.

To the extent that there are deviations from methodology, those can be critiqued directly. Critique of the researchers’ training instead is, itself, a deviation from the methodology. As anyone trained enough in the methodology to be able to participate meaningfully is aware.

The paper was written by people with no training in the methodology, the result was that their methodology was very sloppy, and at this point scientists working in geology, archaeology, and related fields have shown that virtually every claim in the paper has serious methodological issues. It's not a coincidence. Pointing out initially that the people doing the work didn't have the training needed to practice the methodology isn't an ad hominem, it was a correct statement that we should be skeptical of their claims because they did not have the expertise or training needed to do methodologically sound science. In the end it's clear they didn't do methodologically sound science, and the initial calls for skepticism because of their lack of training were correct, regardless of "ad hominen" claims.

> The paper was written by people with no training in the methodology, the result was that their methodology was very sloppy,

To the extent the latter is true, it is the appropriate target of scientific critique. The former, whether or not it is true, is simply irrelevant and to target it true or not to critique the results is the very definition of ad hominem argumentation.

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