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Comment by Macross8299 | Hacker News Reader

Anti-vax stuff aside, the attitude of

>Trust experts or die.

is not a scientific attitude, it is borderline scientism and an appeal to authority. Remember when the tobacco industry paid medical experts such as ENT Doctors to endorse smoking? [0]

The idea that "the rubes" don't have to or shouldn't be allowed to see the data behind FDA decisions and should just trust the experts blindly is completely condescending and is probably a key contributor to anti-vax sentiment and the anti-intellectualism movements you decry.

[0]: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2012/01/big-tobacco-l...

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>is not a scientific attitude

True, but asking non-scientists to have a scientists attitude is ridiculous.

This "everyone is a scientist" idea creates the "everyone is a skeptic" situation, except, when a rube is a skeptic, they're not intellectually skeptical, they're using "skeptic" to mean "bias confirmation".

If you're not a scientist (PhD and publishing) then you don't need a "scientific" attitude.

For the other 99%, you don't need a scientific attitude.

If you are diagnosed with cancer and that diagnosis is confirmed by a second doctor, do you need to demand access to your labs so you can review them personally "with a medical attitude"?

No. Frankly, the only way to have a "scientific attitude" is to spend 4-8 years praciticing in academia. If you don't do that, you can't have the attitude.

You can only pretend. Play makebelieve. Be a pretend scientist. And, almost assuredly, ignore real scientists in the process. After all, due to Illusory Superiority (Dunning-Kruger) you will think yourself just as qualified as the experts. So you will overrule them.

Trust experts or die AKA interdependence in a civilization.

>If you are diagnosed with cancer and that diagnosis is confirmed by a second doctor, do you need to demand access to your labs so you can review them personally "with a medical attitude"?

When considering a medication that is being sold to me such as an anti-depressant with possible long-term harmful side effects, I absolutely want to be familiar with the clinical efficacy and peer reviewed literature on that medication to assess the risks of whether it's worth it for myself.

What about opioids? There were some studies conducted by experts and promoted by the Sacklers that said that opioids were not addictive. Surely I don't have a right to be skeptical of those claims because the surveys were conducted by experts, right? I'm not a post-doc researcher, so obviously I can't tell you that OxyContin is habit-forming.

You're basically arguing for blind trust on the part of the patient, which is very disempowering.

It's very understandable when you present unquestioning obedience and credentialism worship as the only alternative to taking active steps towards being empowered, why people would tell the "experts" to fuck off and trust their own common sense instead as Taleb describes [0]

[0]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...

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