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Comment by invalidOrTaken | Hacker News Reader

>I think you can only have a meaningful debate with an expert if you are humble and you have done your homework.

Would the symmetrical statement, that you can only meaningfully agree with an expert if you are humble and have done your homework, be true?

I don't generally get the sense that "skeptics" of whatever color are less informed than the orthodox. To take myself as an example---I don't really know how vaccines work. I know the broad strokes---the immune system reacts to the dead pathogens and is better-prepared when I actually get infected---but that's just, like something someone told me, I'd have no idea how to verify that specific mechanism of T-cells and B-cells, oh my. If I were to argue with an anti-vaxxer, I would be "right," and they would be "wrong," but it wouldn't be because I was pro-science, but because I was pro-expert.

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I'd say that believing experts is more an act of philosophy than an act of science. In an area where you're not an expert, you can't meaningfully agree with the experts – but you can meaningfully understand the limits of your own knowledge, take notice of the track record of science in general, and conclude that, in the absence of more specific knowledge, believing the experts is a good Bayesian prior.

And the same applies in the other direction. In the absence of knowledge, you can't meaningfully disagree with the experts, but occasionally there are enough warning signs that you can meaningfully choose to be skeptical. (For example, a lack of rigor in the field.)

>I'd say that believing experts is more an act of philosophy than an act of science.

Not philosophy. Faith.

Have you read about the Munchausen Trilemma? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma

I’ve always found that very boring since it seems obvious to me that logical truths require the axiomatic argument, scientific truths require the regressive argument, and reductionism doesn’t allow for complex supernatural claims to transcend from merely needing axiomatic support to affecting scientific truths.

It feels like one of those things in philosophy that religious people greatly exaggerate the importance of.

Well, no - it's the foundational problem of knowledge/epistemology.

How you choose to "solve" it is up to you.

The solution computer scientists like a lot is coherentism. You pull yourself up by the bootstraps - like we do with self-hosting compilers.

Of course, it's just a conceptual game (like all philosophy). The idea of "prove to me that you know..." seems a bit like "Jump for me... Higher!"

>It feels like one of those things in philosophy that religious people greatly exaggerate the importance of.

Appropriately named then!

I agree that in the modern world, many people may find it somewhat "obvious" (or rather, they have a similar belief intuitively), but I think it's very relevant here: of course doubting science requires some kind of faith. So does believing science. Everything requires faith, we can't actually know anything without faith in something.

(I personally am very aggressively areligious, so "faith" here does not necessarily refer to a spiritual faith.)

I think the difficulty with making an equivalence between “faith” and this type of fundamental epistemic limitation is that no matter how well-intentioned you are, religious people are going to take the soundbyte and claim it’s “proof that science can’t explain everything” which will then be “proof that god is possible” which will then mean oppressing people whose beliefs they don’t like.

We need a much different concept than faith.

Faith means continuing to believe something that is massively contrary to the evidence, to preserve some type of fidelity or loyalty to a previous belief commitment.

I think this is massively different than acknowledging the fundamental deductive limitations of reasoning about epistemic metatruths.

>Faith means continuing to believe something that is massively contrary to the evidence, to preserve some type of fidelity or loyalty to a previous belief commitment.

You've just defined faith in a way that wins your argument, but that is not any kind of consensus definition of faith.

I don’t agree. I’m saying there exists a difference of kind between the act of belief in inferential integrity of experts despite fundamental epistemic limitations of philosophy, and the separate act of continuing to believe something contrary to the evidence.

The ubiquitous notion of religious faith is similar to the second thing, and is not similar to the first thing. It’s not a matter of consensus or definition.

Whatever, I don't have time to become an expert in everything, much less the desire. I choose to focus on my small area (which has changed over time, both because my interests change and because my next job needs me to learn something) and trust the rest.

But isn't this part of the point? Philosophically science is about being interested and studying broad range of topics and areas to judge everything for yourself and make your own conclusions, not trust expert opinions. In my experience, whenever I have to rely on an expert opinion I usually feel bad later when I acquire more knowledge in the area myself, as those opinions are almost always wrong.

How are you informed about the experts' opinions. If it's via the news, then what your are getting is almost surely warped.

This statement doesn't even make sense, where are you acquiring this knowledge if not from experts? Are you out there doing field research and conducting your own scientific experiments on every subject you're interested in?

I'd love to hear a couple examples of which "expert opinions" you've disproven for yourself and where you acquired the supporting evidence.

You are confusing opinions with evidence and facts. Obviously you acquire knowledge by reading papers where people are doing research and experiments and presenting evidence, analytics and all the facts from which you can make your own conclusions.

OK, I don't think that this delineation is actually as black and white as you're making it out to be, given most subjects are complex enough to require nuanced interpretations of data/facts, but I'll give you that in some instances there is a fine line, and there are certain areas where there is a lot of disagreement even amongst experts.

Still, an expert, by definition is just someone that has "comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of a subject." You could argue that as soon as you've acquired enough knowledge on a subject to form an accurate opinion, you have yourself become an expert.

Although I'm guessing when you're referring to "experts" you mean "establishment experts." For example, your average doctor whose spent decades studying medicine as opposed to your online research on how to best treat/prevent a certain ailment (you didn't provide an example so I am just referring a fairly common one). What's the difference between your expertise and theirs? On one hand, they have decades worth of rigorous academic study and personal experience over you, on the other hand, you may have a "fresher" perspective that may be devoid of certain institutional biases. I would just strive to stay humble.

I may have looked more in depth into my condition (though that may imply listening to crackpots) than doctors who despite years of study may not be as in depth as me. There is a lot to the entire human body (which is why doctors refer people to specialists, but they need to choose the right specialist which isn't always easy)

except that papers rarely give all the data these days, or even enough to verify the conclusion

>I'd love to hear a couple examples of which "expert opinions" you've disproven for yourself and where you acquired the supporting evidence.

I have one that's related to nutrition. But what's the point if you don't do it yourself, how will you know if I'm right?

"Philosophically science is about being interested and studying broad range of topics and areas to judge everything for yourself and make your own conclusions, not trust expert opinions."

Not quite. It's observation of the world around you. It doesn't preclude experts' opinions, it takes them into account. Reinventing the wheel isn't the goal of science. The goal is to understand why a circle might be the best shape for rolling and under what circumstances it might not be.

More specific to current times, ignoring the advice of epidemiologists with respect to masks and social distancing is proving to be costly in life and economy.

"In my experience, whenever I have to rely on an expert opinion I usually feel bad later when I acquire more knowledge in the area myself, as those opinions are almost always wrong."

Care to share a specific example from your life?

What you're describing was true in the Renaissance, but it's incredibly, achingly difficult for someone to gain expertise in multiple areas of science in this era.

Faith implies there is no mathematically sound reasoning underlying the belief, at least a little

The hypothesis "Expert consensus is more likely to be correct" is falsifiable and thus not purely blind faith

Unfortunately, the recent reproducibility crisis amongst expert ‘scientists’ has damaged this hypothesis greatly.

>Expert consensus is more likely to be correct" is falsifiable

That's one of those things that sounds like it should be falsifiable, but in practice it's not. The statement is far too broad to conduct reasonable experiments, and if you narrow the scope to the point where you can conduct experiments, then your experiments won't support a conclusion that's broad enough to be a sound foundation for "expert consensus is more likely to be correct".

I happen to think expert consensus is generally useful, but there's still an element of faith in my opinion.

To put a finer point the phrase "expert consensus" is circular itself as we tend to take away the "expert" label from anyone whose position diverges too far from the consensus.

Of course it's not 100% black and wide and there is an element of faith.

The consolidated statement is way to wide, but if you take consensus to mean "a large majority like 66%+ portion of the scientific literature within the field(s) relevant to that specific instance" that becomes a lot more testable for an individual issue.

> there is an element of faith

That's exactly my point.

>if you take consensus to mean "a large majority like 66%+ portion of the scientific literature within the field(s) relevant to that specific instance" that becomes a lot more testable for an individual issue.

Yeah we can say that for some specific issue like choosing what time of year to plant tomatoes, expert consensus is useful, but that doesn't generalize, which was also my point.

Belief in experts is itself sound scientific reasoning about the available evidence on experts.

It’s like a chain of custody in legal evidence. If someone presents evidence in court and states that there are logs, seals and timestamps proving the chain of custody and disproving tampering, it is not “an act of faith” to believe the evidence was preserved accurately, even though you only observe details about the chain of custody, not the state of the evidence itself at all times.

It’s similar with expert opinion. You can think of the evidence (which you don’t personally observe) as passing through a series of chain of custody transactions - initial data collection, data preparation, actual study or research, proposed models, fact checking and testing correctness, presentation of results, use in an application / prototype / clinical trial, etc.

Believing in the fidelity of this chain of events is itself amenable to scientific and inductive inquiry.

Just like some rare case where police or attorneys lied about chain of custody with evidence that did get tampered with, sometimes this model of continuing trust at each step of the chain is wrong. Sometimes the chain of events that led to an expert opinion is untrustworthy - someone falsified data or lied, or there was an undetected error.

But that means it is a statistical process with an error rate, not that it contains any aspect similar to faith.

It seems to me that "belief in experts" or not is kind of analogous to the longstanding conflict in Western culture between Catholicism vs. Protestantism.

I mean, philosophically, both sides have good points about fundamental flaws of the other.

The difference between belief and faith is that belief may be substantiated by evidence and can change with new evidence.

I believe that kangaroos are real. If there were suddenly overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I would say okay and start believing that they probably aren't real, not stay firm in the original belief and dismiss the new evidence as a test of my faith.

>And the same applies in the other direction. In the absence of knowledge, you can't meaningfully disagree with the experts, but occasionally there are enough warning signs that you can meaningfully choose to be skeptical. (For example, a lack of rigor in the field.)

You have put is well. Medicine is one such field which generally lacks rigor in my opinion, this is largely true of both mainstream and alternative medicine.

> Would the symmetrical statement, that you can only meaningfully agree with an expert if you are humble and have done your homework, be true?

Yes. But agreeing or disagreeing is not the only option. In [1] the authors suggest that the crustal anisotropy is decoupled from horizontal basal tractions and, instead, created by upper mantle vertical loading, which generates pressure gradients that drive channelized flow in the mid-lower crust. Do you agree or disagree? The truth is, you probably don't have a position on the issue.

If pressed, you might defer to the expert opinion that crustal anisotropy is created by upper mantle vertical loading. But that's not the same as agreeing with it. It's just saying "I don't know, but here's what somebody else says".

Of course, agree/disagree/defer is still too rigid: you can humbly tend to agree (based on some homework) while mostly deferring, etc.

[1] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/28/eabb0476

> but it wouldn't be because I was pro- science , but because I was pro expert.

They do the same but they pick different 'experts': priests, politicians, bloggers, media pundits. We can't escape the fact that we need to rely on other people's opinions to make our own, we can't understand everything from scratch.

The difference is that choosing experts is itself amenable to scientific analysis.

If you assume people are acting with good intentions, this differentiates the case of experts with scientific knowledge vs experts without.

If you assume bad intentions, then all possible expert panels can’t be trusted anyway.

I think when people try to elevate non-scientific experts to the level of scientific experts on a scientific issue, really they are trying to make it tribal and specifically remove objectivity and evidence, when they perceive it as a threat to their tribal commitments and ways of life.

You can of course subvert scientific experts to do the same, but with science you have the option to let objectivity win. No other way of constructing expert panels has that option besides scientific inquiry.

Undoubtedly, one of the largest problems since the dawn of humanity is the refusal to admit "I don't know". This is what is most frustrating to me regarding a variety of subjects including religion (and atheism for that matter), climate change, economics, and others. My formative experiences that communicated the scope of this problem were my time in high school and college when my fellow students seemed to be absolutely terrified to ask any questions. Even the smallest admission that "I'm sorry professor, I didn't understand that. Could you explain it again?" or something to that effect was not ever even considered for probably 80% of students. I believe this is intimately related to how commonly people hold very strong opinions, while either understanding absolutely nothing about the subject when there is plenty of information available (economics, climate change), or where there is no evidence to even address (religion, atheism). They seemingly adopt the popular view of their peers, and rarely consider questioning anything. I won't pretend I have some way to solve this problem, as it seems inherent to humanity, but I believe this is causing the effects that Feynman is lamenting in the article, and I'm also not at all convinced that this problem is peculiar to modern times.

I think it's an inability, rather than refusal. It's not outright impossible to say "this is unknown," but it does conflict with the way our mind naturally works. We don't leave "i don't know" holes. We don't think in terms of degrees of confidence. We think in terms of facts, abstract theories... at least "we" as groups.

There wasn't really a time in the past when people didn't know what the stars were. They always had a view of the world that was complete internally, including "what are stars" knowledge.

Even science, in the philosophically ideal sense, works by theories overtaking earlier theories. We don't go from unknowledge to knowledge. We go from bad knowledge to better, truer knowledge over time.

Interestingly, science in the squishier sense does have more ability to recognize holes in knowledge. Physics has distinct holes in its knowledge base that they are trying to answer. As a human, deciding to do an experiment or study something requires a "we don't know" posture. Epistemologically though, science doesn't have this posture.

It totally falls apart as you distance from hard sciences though. They don't tend to have "quantum theory of gravity" like holes that they are trying to fill.

I disagree. It would be because you’re pro-science. Even your simplistic explanation about reacting to dead pathogen, and something about t cells and b cells, is a model. It underlies at least some class of hypotheses that are amenable to be proven wrong or augmented with further evidence.

To believe in science is not to “know” static facts of a mechanism. It is to constantly reevaluate your best available hypotheses under the requirement of evidence.

Memorizing facts often leads people into trouble. Creationist authors for a long time have given exhaustive biochemical accounts of the blood coagulation cascade as their own form of evidence of intelligent design. The statement of the facts has not much to do with science, rather it’s the choice to propose beliefs drawn from them, and whether this remains rooted in disconfirming your own hypotheses with intellectual honesty or becomes an unfalsifiable just-so story to reaffirm a believe you’ve otherwise arbitrarily chosen for non-scientific reasons.

> Would the symmetrical statement, that you can only meaningfully agree with an expert if you are humble and have done your homework, be true?

Not really, because the experts agree on millions of details that I can look up -even if I don't fully understand them- meanwhile the other side (e.g antivaxxers) don't agree in anything significant and asking them simple basic questions unmask they know nothing about the subject (e.g. ask an antivaxxer some highschool chemistry questions about mercury). So unless you believe it's a giant conspiracy involving every expert in the world plus your highschool teachers plus a lot of books it's easy to claim that I meaningfully agree with the experts even if I don't understand the subject as much as them.

One side of an issue being coordinated doesn't necessarily mean what they're saying it's true, just that they've managed to coordinate their beliefs more. Medieval monks agreed on many details of theology.

Medieval monks couldn't even agree on 'How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_many_angels_can_dance_on_t....

Why were there so many sects, religions and religious wars if they agreed so well?

On the other hand, the speed of light is the same under any system of reference, any regime, culture or religion.

Ah yes, the angels on hairpin.

The debate was about inifinite vs. finite, not about a particular number. It was couched in the terms of angels rather than physical items specificaly to avoid preconceived notions about our physical world - notions which were limited, and recognized as limited, back then. Do we even recognize our notions as limited in our beautiful early XXI century...?

They disagreed on details, and yet agreed on much. Modern scientists agree on much, but disagree on many details, including many questions of great importance. There's even a good old schism in the interpretation of quantum mechanics!

The universality of an object-level truth has little to do with the coherence and marketing of groups claiming it, and worse, claiming ownership of it. To not realize this is to worship the false idol of Science, rather than the scientific method.

All indicators of things that are good and right and true eventually become disconnected from the things they originally indicated, and become tools of power. 'Science', as a word and an idea, is as much a buzzword and cudgel of politics as it is a reference to the search for truth. There is no escape from the inevitable transmutation of our words and symbols into political weapons: the only thing we can do is mitigate the problem by pre-empting it, inventing new words, changing categories, speaking in new metaphors that haven't been turned into applause lights yet. You have to stay a step ahead of the churning masses.

‘true’ is hard to define. If we stick to scientific truth, that domain is a small part of people’s day to day existence:

e.g. science can’t prove ‘does this person love me?’ ‘which flower arrangement is better?’ ‘what color should I paint my walls?’

As the comment one level above mentions, trusting experts is basically just a heuristic.

I might be thinking about this wrong, but does one have to "agree" rather than be indifferent with an expert?

I mean I don't agree or disagree with wearing face masks, but it's very clear the consensus among "experts" is that wearing masks is a good thing to prevent spreading a virus such as covid-19.

My point is more, to me wearing a mask is the "way it is" because the scientific community thinks it is through peer review etc. In my kind disagreement / agreement does not come into the question? I'm more questioning if the consensus is based on proper peer reviewed articles. And if was really concerned about the question I might research these, hopefully, publicly available papers.

In the case of vaccine / anti - vaccine my opinion is not really relevant (whether I agree or disagree), but the consensus is that vaccines helps us. If you think this consensus is wrong it's on you to prove otherwise instead of simply saying "it's my opinion". And the way you do this is to pursue research that can disprove vaccines are good?

The point of science is opinions don't matter, results do?

Maybe I'm being too academic about everything.

On the face-masks, the majority of experts do think it's a good thing, but there is not really any solid evidence. The WHO June 5th statement on this:

At present, there is no direct evidence (from studies on COVID-19 and in healthy people in the community) on the effectiveness of universal masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.

Indeed, interviewed on BBC Radio 4 last week, Professor Venki Ramakrishnan, president of the Royal Society (the UK "academy of science") declared that to ask for such evidence would be "methodological fetishism", we are expected, no demanded, to accept the opinions of experts.

So I'll stand with Feynman on this.

There’s at least as much double-blind scientific trial based evidence of face mask effectiveness as there is the effectiveness of parachutes.

Not at a community level. Only a droplet level. There's no measures on if stopping droplets compensates for the fact that people touch their face every 10 seconds due to wearing a mask. Numerous places with mask laws have skyrocketing case counts.

No there isn't. If there was, why is the British scientist demanding faith rather than presenting evidence for mask wearing? "Methodological fetishism" isn't a real thing, is it.

Here's the mask science reality: there is none. There have only been two studies that looked at whether masks stop a sick wearer infecting healthy people (the other way around to how masks are normally used), one was underpowered and the other concluded no impact. There's plenty of studies on whether masks stop a healthy person being infected by a sick person, but that's not how mask requirements are being justified at the moment.

If you think about it, designing a study to test this hypothesis wouldn't be possible. You'd have to ask for volunteers to specifically hang out in rooms around a sick person who was definitely shedding virus. But you aren't going to get permission to do that over and over again, probably you won't even be able to get volunteers. It's effectively unfalsifiable: exactly the kind of problem that makes for bad science.

It's possible that a simple mask can reduce transmission a bit, if someone is literally coughing phlegm into their mask. If they're not coughing up virus then how is a mask meant to work? The virus is too small to be directly blocked. It can only stop fairly large droplets.

>It can only stop fairly large droplets.

What is your basis for this statement?

If I wear a regular dust mask, without edge sealing, and glasses, my glasses fog up when I exhale. Seems to me suggestive evidence that anything at all deflects normally invisible breath that would travel outward onto the surroundings.

Well, that's pretty well known. There are different tiers of mask. This article looks at the evidence for them:

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/commenta...

Some kinds of masks can stop much finer grained objects than droplets, e.g. gas masks, but the kinds of masks people are actually wearing are just regular cloth masks and there's no evidence they accomplish anything and plenty of evidence they don't: the article goes into this.

It's logical: your glasses fog up exactly because the hot air is exiting the mask and travelling outwards, that's why it's hitting the cold glass of your glasses.

But it's not sufficient to merely deflect a small amount of air from each breath in a different direction. That's not permanently trapping infected air; obviously it can't be because otherwise CO2 saturated air would build up inside your mask and suffocate you. The air has to be able to circulate. The mask is meant to let air through whilst blocking ... well, whilst blocking what? Virus particles? They're far too small. Water droplets that contain virus? Maybe, but only if you're actually spreading water droplets around and if you're asymptomatic then clearly you're not. Yet everyone is being forced to wear masks even if they're visibly healthy, on the basis that "you might be infected without realising it". The science behind this is garbled nonsense, being pushed on people because something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done.

Stopping stuff travelling out is a different matter.

The other thing that's being missed is even for proper masks there are time limits to their effectiveness. That doesn't matter so much for health care professionals who should be frequently replacing the masks, but it is relevant to members of the public walking around.

Either they're keeping the mask on all day and it stops being useful after an hour, or they're taking it off and putting it on as they go in and out of shops.

https://www.ijic.info/article/download/10788/7862/

> This study was conducted to check the efficacy of face masks in limiting bacterial dispersal when worn continuously in Operation Theater. A comparison was done to find out difference between fabric and two ply disposable masks. The first sample was collected prior to wearing the mask, using cough plate method holding a blood agar plate approximately 10 -12 centimeters away from the mouth. The personnel were asked to produce “ahh” phonation. Participants were then asked to don the face mask, continue routine work and report to the study center located inside the theater for further sample collections at designated intervals of 30, 60, 90, 120 and 150 minutes after wearing the fabric mask made of cotton. The study was replicated on immediate next day using two ply disposable mask keeping all the other conditions and personnel exactly the same. Bacterial counts before wearing the mask were 5.36±4.38 and 5.7±2.99 on day 1 and day 2 of study. Bacterial counts were 0.96±1.06 (P<0.001) and 0.7±0.87 (P<0.001) at 30 min; 2.33±1.42 (P<0.001) and 2.36±1.03 (P<0.001) at 60 min; 3.23±1.54 (P=0.007) and 4.16±1.78 (P=0.011) at 90 min; 5.63±4.02 (P=0.67) and 4.9±1.98 (P=0.161) at 120 min and 7.03±4.45 (P=0.019) and 5.6±2.21 (P=0.951) at 150min respectively for fabric and two ply disposable mask. Counts were near pre-wear level in about two hours irrespective of the type of mask. There was no significant difference between cotton fabric and two ply disposable masks. Face masks significantly decreased bacterial dispersal initially but became almost ineffective after two hours of use.

I've heard this a couple of times, it's a bit trite, a little anti-science, but worth some analysis. Suppose your analogy holds: which of mask-wearing and non-wearing is the parachute and which is the empty backpack? I ride the London underground regularly, masks are mandatory and 90-95% of people wear one. I'd say 20% of people let it drift down from their nose while they play on their phones, more than that are constantly adjusting it, touching their face with the hands that are also touching the seats and the hand-rails. Is this more or less dangerous than not wearing one at all? Are we really saying that this question is outside the realm of science?

There is a key part of that phrase "of healthy people". The problem here is that lots of people dont realize they are sick, or are in the earily stage of the sickness with low symptoms yet still infectious. The evidence for this position increases daily.

I agree with you here that, that is definitely an issue. One should never be ridiculed or looked down upon when asked for scientific evidence. But I guess that is a completely different subject of "scientific elitism" or "scientist elitism",

Not that is of any help but the government in Denmark has done sort of the same. If you question their policies and responses to COVID they say “It’s based on advice on scientists and professionals”. You ask what professionals and science for long enough they say well it was a political decision. And this circle go around in till someone gets tired

On the topic of masks, unfortunately people are forgetting that initial spread of SARS-COV-2 was through the eyes.

We will learn a lot from the post mortem of this pandemic...

How you get infected is irrelevant unless you are spending your time in a COVID-19 hospital ward. The question is how you avoid infecting others, in the world as it exists, where most people are not infected but you might be.

Well, the stats on life expectancy over time, cases of infectious diseases and analysis of vaccination programme efficacy are acceptable evidence.

You don't need to understand the mechanism of vaccines, to see data of the effects. Luckily the effective application of science frequently allows us to see that the consensus did in fact improve something, and that even if it's not 100% correct or you don't understand all the nuance, the fact that repeatable and extensive datasets are available for many scientific claims will work in its place.

Of course there are huge exceptions to this, but it's not always true that you need to understand to have an opinion else it is simply faith. It can be knowable and verifiably effective.

You don't need to understand combustion engines to know that they transfer energy. You don't need to trust that scientists made them more efficient when you can measure distance travelled and volume of fuel required.

> Would the symmetrical statement, that you can only meaningfully believe an expert if you are humble and have done your homework, be true?

Yes and no.

Yes, because as you point out, you need to be able to verify if you are to really trust someone.

No, because the society is largely built on trust anyway, and as long as you can trust other people to verify the claims then you don't need to verify everything yourself.

(That probably explains why so many libertarians have certain anti-scientific beliefs, if you don't have trust in the society at large, there is no way you can verify all the research.)

> I don't generally get the sense that "skeptics" of whatever color are less informed than the orthodox.

I get the sense of that a lot in the global warming debate. If the deniers understood the basics of the theory of global warming, for example, that it predicts (and we observe) stratospheric cooling and polar amplification, they could never claim that it could be the sun.

With vaccines I think it is similar. I don't know much but I would bet there are classical experiments and observations that establish how the immune system works, and these pretty much lead you to the current theory.

Which brings us to a point - if someone argues too much against a scientific theory, but are unable to create a decent competing alternative, it is probably a sign they either haven't done their homework, or they don't understand that scientific theories are supposed to be only the best available explanations, not anything more.

Check mate.

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