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Comment by veavo | Hacker News Reader

We already know the political slant of "experts". Making "experts" write the community notes would lead to them being as untrustworthy as "fact checkers".

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Painting all experts with such a broad brush leads to what is an epistemic waste land in which you are cut off from everyone else's knowledge, since you can dismiss any belief you dislike by simply declaring it expert knowledge.

I don't think he's painting a picture that all experts are automatically wrong about everything just because they're experts. Rather, that "experts" are as morally biased as any other person (it turns out that 8 years of university doesn't fundamentally change anything about the human condition), and that they shouldn't be granted unchecked epistemological authority over subjective matters. Someone who knows the truth and has a political agenda is not less likely to lie than someone who doesn't know the truth and has a political agenda, and that's even the case if you assume that all experts do magically know everything about their field.

Great exhibition of terminal trust decline. “Expert” is a label, it means what people decide it means.

Ultimate societies have inability to foster trust will be terminal and unlike why the crypto bros think, technology will not safe us.

You mean that the more people know about something, the more they tend to have certain opinions? That's interesting.

I wonder if I myself should try to align my views with those who know more, rather than those who know less?

Often the problem is that the guy who has made something his career posts incorrect things more often than the guy who hasn't. Some of the reasons for these are:

- self-interest

  - intentionally since it protects their interests

  - accidental since they've spent so much time they need it to be meaningful

  - accidental since they want to please their fellow experts

  - intentionally since they want to go with the herd

- selection bias towards being someone who cares about this very much goes with lack of aptitude

- historical bias

  - most people are better equipped than experts to spot paradigm shifts because experts are over-indexed on the status quo

- no field expertise

Ultimately, it's up to you how you weight people's opinion, and may each person's epistemology serve them appropriately.

It's not the more they know, it's the more credentials they have. Which is not the same, often wildly so.

Oh so you mean "expert" as in "labelled expert by someone" not actually "someone who is an expert"?

What do we call the actual experts then so that we don't confuse them with nonexperts with credentials?

Unfortunately, the uneducated and uninformed tend to hold the strongest opinions.

"Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

Usually until someone bothers to check.

Like the field of psychology which surprisingly often produces results about very successful liberal-endorsed interventions (head start programs or growth mindset) that reliably return weaker results as they're tested more and finally stop reproducing altogether. These, sometimes massive, failures do impressively little to tame the smugness of their proponents.

You’ve just described the scientific method. That’s how it is intended, and that’s currently the best way to make decisions according to our knowledge. Failure is completely normal.

First, shoddy research getting published because it matches authors' and reviewers' bias is not some immanent part of the scientific method.

Second, that is not what the comment was about. It was about repeated debunking of reality's supposed liberal bias from which its fans consistently refuse to learn.

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