I dislike this logic: it penalises expertise and commitment. It’s similar to the way broadcasters frequently dismiss people as “activists”. As far as I’m aware, he is only not neutral because he has learned a lot about the problem and found it serious enough to devote himself to doing something about it.
When weighing people's opinions, expertise should be rewarded but commitment should be penalized.
Committed people have a psychological need to prove themselves right and to discount contrary evidence. This is due to a combination of conscious and subconscious factors: enhancing one's social and career standing, making oneself feel better about the invested effort, etc. Among people who spent a decade or two arguing in favor of a certain theory, not many would be comfortable admitting they were wrong all along.
There is a period of time when someone is already an expert but not yet committed to any particular belief. This is an excellent time to listen to their opinions. Unfortunately, this period is usually quite short for most people.
Sometimes (as in this case), the commitment is quite obvious; at other times, it may be hard to detect it.
This feels like an unfairly broad brush to paint committed people with. True commitment and expertise invariably results in truths indistinguishable from opinion to the outsider, they can offer considerable insight to those who will listen.
> When weighing people's opinions, expertise should be rewarded but commitment should be penalized.
"Penalized" is too dismissive, and borderline bulverism. I would say it is important to listen to the committed while being critical and wary of any bias they may have.
That negative score is added to the positive score from the expertise part of the author when I determine how much credence to give their argument.
When presented with a true argument, information that can be reasoned about or verified, this is where penalization is not appropriate - healthy skepticism ensures you are critical of it, but an attitude of penalization adds a handicap to every argument produced by a committed person regardless of any truth it could hold.
When the argument is almost entirely emotional however I'm inclined to agree - a negative weighting is reasonable.
The parent's principle is in fact quite applicable in this case due to the lack of arguments presented along side facts and explanation, but that does not justify over generalizing it to argument from all committed people.
Also, in the history of science and philosophy, you’ll find that the majority of those whose work significantly advanced human knowledge were committed to their work and to the promotion of their ideas.
You say this as if it was a negative.
Besides the history of science is very fuzzy, and complex enough that "commitment" by itself is too vague a term. Also, science is not homogeneous enough for any kind of it to be a positive on every field.
That is absolutely correct.
Is there? Or is this an unfalsifiable classification that people one agrees with can be put in, and people who one doesn't agree with can be pushed out of?
The idea that opinions have no relation to expertise is a general argument against expertise. The magic period during which people have expertise but don't have opinions seems related to that magic period for journalists when they understand all of the facts about a story accurately but have no opinion about what is true and what is not true.
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My own take is that it's less about a period of time [during which loosely-held opinions ostensibly ossify into the kind of commitment that interferes with honest pursuit of truth] and more about mindset, ego and circumstance. Which latter variables are difficult if not impossible to ascertain or verify. Which is why peer-reviewed science -- in removing as much subjectivity as humanly possible -- is our best and only plausible path to truly objective knowledge. (Which in turn is not the only kind of knowledge worth having or sharing! Far from it! But I digress.)
This is straight paranoia, unless you plan on only talking to people about their job or topics that don’t interest them.
You’re clearly too committed to your opinion here.
> There is a period of time when someone is already an expert but not yet committed to any particular belief.
Experts without opinions? It sounds like you’re just talking about a toaster. Toasters have no opinions about you when you set the shade to dark, like a monster
Experts who have strong unchanging opinions are really former experts pretending some point in the past is frozen.
I’m suggesting that hand-waving away information because someone has some strong opinions is silly. I don’t believe someone would ever dive into something that deep if they didn’t have some commitment to some opinion about their area of expertise
Not to say this bloke isn't right on the money. But one would certainly want to read other, less biased sources to weigh the actual gravity of the problem.
Plainly described, this is a grave threat to public health being deliberately covered up by people with monetary interests. We've faced literally hundreds of these threats since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Remember asbestos?
Public awareness is the first major obstacle. Standing in the way of that means more people will die than necessary.
It's not hard to convince me that any type of plastic is bad. I dont use plastic containers for food. Only wood, metal and glass are in my kitchen when it contacts food. I dont even like plastic for anything else. If I can opt for something that's not made of plastic, I'd rather pay a premium than have it all if I can (obviously what I'm holding to type this flies in my belief's face, but right now the anti-plastic war I wage is a hill I will die on and it'll be a brutal death). Yet, after reading the article, I have doubts on what he's claiming.
Journalism used to be emotional only at very key, important points. The deadpan nature allowed for disciplined emotional tones to have extreme, nearly atomic impact on a subject. That used to move people. Now, everything is a life or death struggle. For fucks sake, figuring out what bathroom to use was and still is a "heated debate". 99% of people have zero issues figuring this out. Less than 1% are arguing yet everyone has to feel like THIS is what will collapse society if we dont fix it. The constant barrage of outlandish "passionate" claims to "save the world" along with the deep dark shady underworld of business, after a while, "yup, whatever". While I will always err on the side of "fuck plastic", I will also admit that I'm a casualty of the current "journalism" climate of ever increasing sense of doom around every corner. I dont believe the author even though I philosophically should knee jerk to being a cheerleader all because of the tone of the article. And given some other comments, I'm not alone.
And yes, my word choice is relevant to the theme I'm discussing.
With respect to the article, it's an opinion piece and clearly marked as such. I'm not sure if this is a difference between US and UK papers, but in papers that still try to have some journalistic integrity in the UK there is, by convention, a difference between articles marked as 'Opinion' and news articles. The writers of opinion pieces are invited to submit articles on a one-off basis and are not necessarily journalists, they can be anyone and the articles they write are expected to hold an opinion so when you read one the understanding is that it will be biased towards a particular viewpoint. So the Guardian frequently has opinion pieces written by politicians (generally centrist but from the left and right of politics), activists, scientists, etc. These opinion pieces typically lean leftish on average, because its The Guardian, but individually they are not always left leaning.
Do newspapers from other countries have a similar convention?
Becoming passionate about something is generally a result of the interpretation of facts, not the cause. It's very difficult to become passionate about plastic pollution without any knowledge of plastic pollution. The only people that can maintain this fantasy libertarian opinion without enthusiasm are people who support plastic pollution because it makes them money, and pay people to come up with arguments to continue doing it - hence all people without a financial stake are hopelessly biased activists.
If they're not making money, what could they possibly be getting out of it? They're obviously insane and feeding their own egos through heroism, and therefore can't be believed.
(As far as I know. If there's a study about all activists, please correct me.)
You need a neutral perspective, same reason dev should be his own qa, or lawyer should not represent himself or a doctor not operate on family.
While they can be objective and unbiased, it is right to question that, when the author has a vested interest in the matter as it easy to loose perspective.
Humans are emotional beings, not robots. If you want to have high performance, you want the performer to care deeply about his work.
Biases should not be hidden though! I think that is the pathology people generally confuse with bias. Bias is a positive thing, hiding it is not.
This does not contradict the above examples (lawyer, doctor, dev) but rather highlights there are different situations and no single approach to bias suffices.
Besides, journalism is almost never unbiased. If you don't know the bias of the writer, it means the writer has a hidden agenda. Much better to flaunt the agenda, then.
If everything is above board there's nothing to lose. But hand-waving it away doesn't help anyone except people with motives that appear good at first blush but are in fact not.
Our bodies are full of "toxins". For example, our bones are made up of calcium and phosphorus. Yet, if you eat a pinch of powdered phosphorus, you die.