Hacker News Reader

Comment by ironmagma | Hacker News Reader

Careful to not play the appeal to authority. Anyone can understand anything, regardless of their so-called qualifications. Are they likely to? No, and that’s why someone’s qualifications are purely a heuristic, not a prerequisite.

View on HN

It's extra frustrating because organizations like the CDC get held to lower standards than anyone else. They can make a pronouncement recommending the use of face masks for SARS-CoV-2 community transmission when the body of the research confirms that (a) such intervention has never been tried in an RCT and indeed the whole "my mask protects you" hypothesis is intentionally unfalsifiable, (b) the research literature documents numerous negative impacts whereas the positive impact on transmission is completely unproven at best, and yet their evidence-less pronouncement is considered evidence in its own right and such a pronouncement is used as a citation in Wikipedia articles, etc.

(Just using masking as an example, if any onlookers strongly believe that masking is efficacious for the stated purpose just imagine I gave a different example, although I don't see how anyone could reach that conclusion about masking specifically based on the research literature out there which is neutral at best)

Or as another example, the CDC loves to try to encourage people to take the flu vaccine, and yet I was shocked to discover that it takes 71 flu shots to prevent a single flu case, 29 flu shots to prevent one ILI (this is a better number than the flu case number since really we care about ILI in general, but even so 29 is an abysmal number), AND that regardless of the mediocre reduction in cases/ILI, it makes essentially no difference in hospitalizations.

Citation on the flu vaccine stuff: https://www.cochrane.org/CD001269/ARI_vaccines-prevent-influ...

I didn't realize until this year how much of "public health" involves (a) actively and intentionally lying to the public (for example, if you read about the AIDS crisis you learn about the "noble lies" told about who was vulnerable as well as the not-even-noble lies like when Fauci told people you could get AIDS from close contact with someone with AIDS when the scientific evidence showed that to be false), and (b) is really a giant marketing campaign for various big pharma interests (I say that as someone who is an unashamed free-market capitalist, not that the US is actually a true free market when it comes to the pharma/medical industry)

I'm not insisting that a claim is true just because an authority says it is. You can't just bring up "appeal to authority" and call it a day.

I'm insisting that the average unqualified individual should not think they have a better chance of being correct over the authorities in question.

There's no other rational option for unqualified individuals than to listen to medical authorities unless you have a medical degree yourself and have read and analyzed the research yourself.

How does authorities being wrong / changing their recommendations factor in to what your consider a rational option? If you were a high risk individual back in January 2020 who ignored their advice and quarantined + wore a mask (an effective mask, i.e N-95), you made the right choice.

Despite how much smarter and informed humanity is, we still make decisions based on trust. Science can only explain so much and runs out of answers eventually.

> If you were a high risk individual back in January 2020 who ignored their advice and quarantined + wore a mask (an effective mask, i.e N-95), you made the right choice.

Did they? Or was the chance they'd come in contact with Covid at that point very low and those masks would be of much better use at hospitals where the chance of coming into contact with Covid was very high? At least, that was what the experts were saying at the time. I donated my N-95 masks (that I had from California fires) not because we thought they didn't do anything in January 2020, but because the experts said they were of better use in hospitals.

> Science can only explain so much and runs out of answers eventually.

You say this as if there's a better place to find answers. Where is that place?

> Did they? Or was the chance they'd come in contact with Covid at that point very low and those masks would be of much better use at hospitals where the chance of coming into contact with Covid was very high? At least, that was what the experts were saying at the time. I donated my N-95 masks (that I had from California fires) not because we thought they didn't do anything in January 2020, but because the experts said they were of better use in hospitals.

You're saying a high risk person (high risk meaning they would likely die from covid - immunosuppressed, etc.) wearing an N95 mask and quarantining was a bad choice? I'm not sure how those masks would be better used if the person is at a high risk of dying to covid.

> You say this as if there's a better place to find answers. Where is that place?

Interpreting all the data available to you. Would you have shamed a person for not choosing this man as their surgeon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Duntsch after they researched his past operations. There are more factors than just the research that need to be considered.

There are actually a lot of reasons to be skeptical of experts — the same as why you should be skeptical of anyone. Appeal to authority has a contrapositive: the disappeal to lack of authority. The arbitrary person can be right just as much as the expert can. The whole point of logic and reason is that it’s about facts, not the people.

Critically the problem with your reasoning is the last sentence. No, you do not need to have a medical degree to be right when a doctor is wrong; ask anyone who’s had a medical issue that all doctors agree does not exist.

Isn’t that inverse, not contrapositive? Here’s how I’m understanding it:

> appeal to authority

authority -> trust

> disappeal to lack of authority

not authority -> not trust

The contrapositive of the first proposition would be

not trust -> not authority

which is a rather different claim.

True, the word was wrong. The point though is that for this logical fallacy, there is an equal and opposite logical fallacy. Saying authority implies truth is just as wrong as saying lack of authority implies falsehood.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com