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Comment by wyattpeak | Hacker News Reader

It may be overstated for effect (which the author acknowledges), but it's a little more dramatic than a caterpillar in that it ends up without a brain, while a butterfly doesn't.

I also don't think current thinking holds that the organs of a caterpillar disappear completely during metamorphosis, though I could easily be wrong.

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A caterpillar becomes a soup of cells, fats, and proteins. Some species do not retain any multi-cellular structures- others only a tiny few.

Interestingly, the still exhibit learned avoidance behaviors after complete this near complete disassembly and reassembly.

Are you an expert? If so I defer, but if not I think you're repeating an old understanding of the process. From a bit more reading a substantial portion seems to dissolve, but far from everything.

Here's a paper tracking the metamorphosis of painted lady butterflies in considerable detail:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2013.030...

Are you an expert? If so I defer

Don't. An expert is the person most likely to be able to provide good support for their claims.

I agree. The stance "I defer to the experts" is potentially very damaging to the growth of knowledge, and can quickly lead to what philosopher of science, Imre Lakatos, called a 'degenerative paradigm,' where increasingly elevated credentials represent increasingly less actual skill and knowledge.

While credentials perform a necessary function, they are a placeholder, an IOU, and not themselves final grounds to accept a claim. They ought not to be treated as a primary source, and a claim based on a bare assertion of expertise should be accepted provisionally and only on the understanding that support can, in fact, be provided if the matter is pressed.

In short, your definition is a pretty good one.

I can see the argument for it, but I think that, especially at present, more harm is being done by a belief that expert opinion should be subject to obsessive outside scrutiny (by whom?) than this fairly academic concern about damaging the growth of knowledge.

For all that people like to point out the conservativeness of past experts rejecting ideas ultimately proven correct, few like to engage with the fact that almost all of those ideas were ultimately championed from within the establishment, not by radical outsiders.

It is not a matter of a political who:whom, but of an impersonal, objective 'what' i.e. the process of rationality.

Arguments should be able to stand on their own merit irrespective of whether their origin is 'outsiders', or the credentials of the originator. Again, it is very damaging to the institution of knowledge to say: "I accept your thesis on the basis of your credentials alone, and will investigate no further, either to increase my understanding, or to test its veracity."

I didn't say don't listen to experts. I didn't say don't respect expert opinions, only radical outsiders.

Here you have someone presenting evidence! But saying "if you're an expert, I defer". You can expect an expert to make their case and allow it to stand on its own. Beware experts who invoke their own authority as an argument.

That's an incredible paper! The supplementary materials are exquisite and can be obtained here [0]. I'd very much like to get ahold of the enormous raw dataset, but alas their margin was too small to contain it: "Owing to file size limitations, no repository capable of archiving the entirety of the voxel data for these scans currently exists".

[0] https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.b451g

I noticed that too; hopefully in the intervening 7 years these sorts of limitations are no longer, but I suspect scientific data simply expandss to fill the archive space available, and more ;(

One of my favorite Radiolab episodes[1] was about just this:

MOLLY: What do you think happens inside the chrysalis?

JAD: I think that -- I actually have never thought about it, to be honest.

MUSEUM GUEST: I don't know. I don't -- I don't understand how it works.

MOLLY: Not many people have.

MOLLY: Are you, like, surprised that you actually don't know?

MUSEUM GUEST: Yeah, I'm surprised. I thought, like, I knew and I don't.

MOLLY: Those are folks I met at the museum.

JAD: Hey, hold up. Now that I've thought about it for a second, isn't it simply that the caterpillar is inside the shell, it sort of snuggles up, and then it grows a wing off of its right side and then off of its left side, and it just pops wings out?

MOLLY: No. That is actually what I thought, but that's not right at all...

[1] - https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radi...

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