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Comment by Cyph0n | Hacker News Reader

No, it’s that the average person cannot make decisions about complex subjects.

This is not a new development: the boundaries of scientific knowledge - across all fields - have required a large amount of specialization for a while now. The barrier to entry is a PhD, and even then you’re only an expert in a small part of your field.

If you suddenly decide to jump in without context and make judgements about topics you are not qualified to talk about all while ignoring the state of the art, can you really expect others to take you seriously?

I think the real cancer is the rapid rise of distrust of subject matter experts.

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> No, it’s that the average person cannot make decisions about complex subjects.

Can PhDs and Nobel Prize winners, the quintessential experts, make decisions about complex subjects?

If they could, wouldn't Long-Term Capital Management still exist today?

Would the IMF have said, months before the subprime crisis, that global economic risks were on the decline?[0]

Nassim Taleb's tweets are an endless source of examples of experts (PhDs, even!) being clueless, sometimes dangerously so.

Excessive trust of subject matter experts is a very real danger, and a significant one.

[0]: World Economic Outlook: Spillovers and Cycles in the Global Economy. Washington, DC: IMF, April, 2007

It didn't actually take an expert to see that Daszak's paper in The Lancet was making claims that weren't backed up. Basic logical and scientific thinking with a little background knowledge were more than enough to raise serious doubts as to his bias.

Intelligent people who questioned Daszak's paper got memory-holed. Their posts were removed, had their reach limited, were placed under warning banners, etc, simply for raising the mere possibility of lab leak origin.

I could give many more examples of "subject matter experts" giving us ample cause to throw them in prison, never mind distrusting them - WMD lies, false flag attacks, staged incidents, etc.

All reported and repeated with zero gorm. No accountability. Dissenters get smeared, fined, jailed. Protestors get blocked off, boxed in, ignored, mocked, minimized. Rare politicians speaking truth get marginalized, smeared, mocked, ignored, cheated. Threatened.

Seeing this get worse and worse for decades, how can you seriously argue that our distrust is the problem? Distrust is more than justified, it's demanded. Anything else is ostrich shit.

By distrust, do you mean “blindly believe SMEs to be wrong just because they’re an SME” or “fail to blindly believe what SMEs say?”

If people don’t understand a complex subject, then I think they should neither endorse nor reject SMEs’ opinions on the matter. People don’t have to have a belief about everything. Maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re not. Blind trust is dangerous.

More like "blindly believe SMEs to be wrong because I watched a few YouTube videos".

How do you know those with opinions different from yours based those opinions completely on a few YouTube videos?

I don't know, I think we trust people to make decisions about complex subjects all the time when it comes to their personal lives.

I think the problem is this, in a reasonable society we would say: here are the relevant facts, here's the supporting data, make up your own mind. In reality what our society now does is says "_you must accept conclusion X, and if you don't you're an idiot_" with absolutely no real justification.

> In reality what our society now does is says "_you must accept conclusion X, and if you don't you're an idiot_" with absolutely no real justification.

I don’t agree with the “no real justification” part. But even if we set that aside, context matters! We are almost 2 years into a global pandemic with multiple vaccines widely deployed and extremely well-tested, yet a significant minority is still denying the vaccine’s efficacy.

To be quite frank, after witnessing how the world has reacted to this pandemic, I am now much less surprised by the ignorance depicted in zombie movies and shows :)

When I say no real justification, I don't mean that a justification doesn't exist, I mean that it's rarely given in a coherent way.

I think a big problem with the vaccine messaging (from people and institutions) is that it ignores human psychology. To give maybe a silly example, lets say I was hosting an office party and I brought a soft serve ice cream machine. The value of ice cream speaks for itself, so I imagine I would be giving out a lot of ice cream. There are probably a few people that wouldn't want ice cream though. Maybe they're lactose intolerant, or on a diet, or they have tooth sensitivity. Lets say I start pressuring these people, mocking them and generally getting in their face about it. People would start to think something is up right? What if I then said "everyone must have ice cream, or you're fired", people would suddenly start wondering: why is this guy so insistent that I have ice cream? Is there something in the ice cream? Is this some weird Jonestown thing going down? I imagine a lot of people would refuse the ice cream on principle.

I feel like with the vaccine and the mask mandates "not getting sick from a horrible virus" should be able to sell itself. But people are now really distrustful, partially because the messaging has been so over the top forceful, often contradictory or misleading, and partially because the vaccine has been overhyped (remember when Biden said if you got the vaccine you wouldn't get sick? That's just demonstrably untrue.) And now people think that if they just double down on this it's going to help, but like in my ice cream example, it's just going to make people wonder what on earth is going on.

Unless you have some sort of real power over people, attempting to bully them into seeing your point of view just is not an effective way to convince anyone.

Medical experts have had a worse-off time than, say, physicists or chemists though? And strains of economics experts are understandably not trusted depending on one's income class, but putting economics on par with physics, chemistry and biology is complicated in itself.

The most troublesome parts of expert mistrust was one scientific group going after anothe, as with scientists of one specialty turning into epidemiologists overnight and claiming that vaccines have contributed to thousands of deaths. As a statistician, I had to deal with junk statistics and regressions in just such a pre-print that caused a lot of panic in my little research community here.

Yep, that’s a whole other can of worms! As if having a PhD in field X makes one an expert in all other fields..

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