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Comment by toolz | Hacker News Reader

I believe life is most pleasant when you choose to err on the side of trusting experts, but there is something quite amusing (to me) that programmers have "cargo culting" and if you write code and deeply invest in any community you'll meet experts all the time that do things just because others do them, but then you'll meet someone in another highly trained field and just trust what they say is all evidence based.

It's rather curious how many high skill professions seem to default to trusting others based on their credentials.

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The problem is that, as soon as you hit moderate complexity, validating claims becomes difficult, time-consuming, and full of traps. Are you going to microscopically analyse every sausage you eat? If not, how do you trust that it's safe? Experts.

I get what you're saying, but I also understand that poses it's own problems. Just because trusting the experts is the best we can do, does not mean that it doesn't sometimes come with significant consequences. History is littered with people abusing their expert status to maliciously achieve some goal.

The first example that comes to my mind is the Tuskegee experiment, where the US public health service and CDC allowed 100 of the 400 men in their study to die, refusing to provide them with treatment for syphilis and preventing them from getting treatment by other means, so they could study the men. They also never revealed to those men that they had syphilis.

It’s why pluralism is so important, where experts hold each other to account. It’s worrying when not believing some dogma causes you personal problems.

That behaviour is morally beyond bankrupt and racist. Doesn't mean the people involved were or were not experts in their fields so.

I'm happy eating sausages in the UK but less so in say Nepal. No experts involved, just a look at the shops.

All things considered, Nepalese meat is propably saver than industrial one. After all, the remains seen on the sreetside are from the same day, meaning whatever meat you buy was still alive in the morning.

Having eaten in both places and gotten ill in Nepal I'm skeptical. He's a pic of a typical meat shop there. https://c8.alamy.com/zooms/6/445bf76d991f4c27a9b88318955c2e3...

and uk https://www.ballardsbutchers.co.uk/sites/default/files/style...

note differences in cleanliness, refrigeration and so on.

The issue is not the meat, it's the dust. Properly washing it before cooking takes care of that. Vegetables are no different in that regard.

Without stringent laws, drafted with experts, your "rule of looks" wouldn't be worth the bits it's written on.

That sounds like a belief. Laws are obviously incomplete, circumvented and broken all the time. There is no substitute for common sense when it comes to not getting food poisoning. Some data:

There is the show "Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern" in which he ate weird stuff around the globe. He mentioned across several interviews that he never got sick on one of his trips by mostly just staying away from stuff like known bad tap water.

At the same time he had gotten food poisoning 4 times in the last decade in the US. Including

>Worst case was in Portland, Maine eating mussels at a crappy restaurant that I shouldn't have been eating in in the first place. On the road, in the third and fourth world I have not gotten sick.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230607121840/https://starcasm....

If i recall his rule of thumb is that if the local grandmas eat there and they dont use stuff you have to be exposed to for a while to tolerate it (rotten food / tap water in India) you are good to go.

> Laws are obviously incomplete, circumvented and broken all the time.

If they were, we'd have rates of food poisoning close to Nepal's. But we don't. Obviously laws have to be enforced, with checks and all, but they largely work.

Same for tap water: when it's handled following expert-based rules, you don't need to stay away from it. Sure, some can build resistance by repeated exposure, but not everyone; and anyway we don't need to, if we employ the scientific knowledge we built over centuries. It's like saying that births will happen even without expert assistance: sure, but chances that stuff will go horribly wrong are dramatically higher.

"They largely work" doesnt run counter to my argument. I am saying there is no way around common sense to prevent food poisoning in an individual. Being able to lower the overall risk doesnt change that.

You can get food poisoning in the first world by over relying on regulation when you should have known better and you can avoid getting food poisoning in the third world by applying common sense. As long as you can afford to which most people there cant. If tainted water is all you got, you will get sick.

We are making different types of arguments, being able to lower the overall risk doesnt mean common sense / "rule of look" is worthless. Nor does it become worthless in an unregulated environment.

You cant actually trust that its safe to eat, you just like the idea and act accordingly. And deal with the consequences of the uncaught error cases. Tainted food still occurs.

At best you can be confident / trust that a product is created in a given process which manages certain risks through certain means.

Also, finding faults in said process is a lot easier then coming up with it or executing it. Be it making a sausage that is unlikely to make you sick or coming to an expert judgement with sufficient confidence to act on.

It doesnt require the ability to validate a process to find it faulty, you just have to detect an error case occurring that isnt dealt with.

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” ― Michael Crichton

Usually, the cost of doing something the wrong way as a programmer is minimal compared to say- a doctor or a rocket scientist. There's not really a governing body on how to do things, as in actual engineering- and most of the work we do is under the constraint of time. saving time means deferring decisions to others. I personally find that there's a lot of value in sifting through and examining the myriad of opinions on a given subject, and coming to your own conclusion, but in the professional world, this a luxury for but a few.

Trust but verify.

Asking experts to provide rationale for their decisions should be welcomed by experts.

All the people I consider experts I ever encountered, where more than happy to explain their rationals. I learned a shit ton of things listening to them.

Experts plus common sense and direct evidence I think works. Experts sometimes come out with complete nonsense, especially if there's politics involved.

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