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Comment by zasz | Hacker News Reader

I'm no fan of toxic chemicals in our food and I don't trust the government or corporations to do enough to protect it, but it seems fair to me to say that a PhD in philosophy and a master's in physics are not particularly relevant to claiming expertise in evaluating toxicological claims.

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A high school dropout can be a source of expertise if she commits herself to learning the subject material and understanding the context of the claims she is making.

When someone with a PhD in philosophy is per se blacklisted regarding other matters of worldly concern, credentialism has gone too far.

Yes. In fact, from a slightly different perspective, one can easily argue that this very credentialism is a component of the control apparatus exploited by the "vested interests".

To become credentialed in a field, you must spend multiple years repeating the same things over and over, getting programmed to perceive and approach problems in compliance with the field's orthodoxy.

There is a small core of people who decide whether you will gain your credential or not. These persons generally have interests besides just "train the best new $OUR_FIELDers out there", if only because that's subjective and will take many years to play out. They're generally looking for funding, projects, publications, appointments, etc. In charge of those people is university administration, and their conflict of interest is so obvious and inherent that it's a waste of time to type it out.

So you have this big powerful apparatus that has many little gullets that can be made to respond much more favorably by pouring a little money here, a little prestige there, etc. Many of these "gullets" will balk if this is done openly, but if you add a thin layer of abstraction and ambiguity, very few people will even notice the relationship, let alone care. It really only takes a minimal amount of obfuscation to get people to jump on board with something that has direct personal benefit to offer.

As such, the perspective of intelligent outsiders who haven't gone through an elaborate niche-specific brainwashing process should be valued, not dismissed.

It's fair to say that, because it's true, but it's not in and of itself a reason to write somebody off as a nut, or assume they have not found any other way to gain expertise on the thing they are talking about. I think OP's point was just that people used her unrelated qualifications as a way to dismiss her without reference to her actual argument.

That's totally fair, and you interpreted what OP was trying to say better than I did.

I would argue that her advanced degrees put her far above average in her ability to read technical literature on the subject. She’s not doing original research in the field, merely sharing what she has learned from reading existing research. Knowledge she would like to spread when our own FDA puts its head in the sand.

In the same universe where there exists a non-trivial number of highly successful subject matter experts that are college dropouts, why do you believe this?

There's limited time and a lot of bullshit to wade through, and I'm busy enough staying abreast of my chosen fields. Credentialism is often abused, but it remains a useful heuristic. It's definitely not useful for people who are expert enough to evaluate claims in and of themselves, but that's not most people. I'm not an expert in medicine, biochemistry, or whatever, so I'm not qualified to sift out the genuine autodidacts from the cranks. Whereas, I'm qualified to sift out autodidactic programmers who dropped out of HS.

By your own measure of credentials I find her reasoned, data backed opinion more valid than your skepticism.

What are your credentials?

Statistical analysis is generally universal and independent of a given discipline; nor does it require a PhD.

Society encourages everyone to draw simple, binary boxes around people, but people are more complicated than that.

Neither is a massive corporate PR budget, but it'll work wonders at widely spreading the specific claims that benefit you, whether or not you just made them up or paid to have them written down by a third party.

That PhD in philosophy is likely to give an otherwise naive person the useful information of, "yes, seemingly nice people will act like this if it benefits them, or if they've deferred to some authority that requires it of them". It'll also give a grounding in 'rationalizing such decisions'.

She didn't do the research. She was trumpeting research done by people with training in the field.

A person's credentialing does not make facts any less true.

I believe the debate is around whether or not they are facts to begin with.

Yes, which is why I said "facts" and not "the facts." There is the point of this situation, and the point of ignoring a person's informed opinion. I was discussing the latter.

>Yes, which is why I said "facts" and not "the facts."

Wow that is an extremely subtle distinction.

I can understand that as reason to doubt her findings, and have further investigation, but the empirical evidence is increasingly agreeing with her...

I don't think discrediting the person, rather than their arguments, furthers the discussion.

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