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Doctors told people smoking is healthy in the past. Harvard apologized for pushing sugar as healthy 60 years ago. Flat Earth was the accepted truth at some time, and Round Earthers considered nut jobs. Not being able to questioning anything "science has settled", would basically kill advancement.

This tweet spoke to me:

> all this “believe experts” dogma is legit indistinguishable from the rhetoric of evangelical christians. ffs please just go to church and leave science to the skeptical assholes.

- https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1381237434512502784?s=2...

This implies the experts are giving their opinions in the same style as church leaders, which is blatantly false, and probably a little dangerous to equate.

"Believe the people who will explain themselves to a degree you'll understand, and who change their opinion when new information is presented." is a more complete way of expressing that thought. There are other ways of expressing that thought, I wouldn't be surprised if `pg has an essay on this.

Skeptics are right to be skeptical, but what "skeptic" usually means in modern culture is, "intransigent". The line between healthy skepticism and dogmatic rejection of basic reasoning has blurred substantially.

Well said

Thanks, I'm thinking particularly about the hay anti-vaxxers are making about J&J right now, for some reason the whole situation bothers me.

You still shouldn’t trust anyone expert or not. If they write a paper read it and incorporate its findings into your understanding of the world but don’t take what they say as gospel. This is what most people get wrong about experts.

But didn't the expert write the paper? how do I trust what's in that paper anyway? Shouldn't I replicate the results myself first before I make any changes to my beliefs? But then again, how do I trust my own results, someone could have tainted them, or the experiment itself could include bias or just be poorly constructed to eliminate confounding variables, which would of course result in an outcome that isn't useful!

A better option would be to eschew certainty. Stop trying to "know" things, and get comfortable making decisions based on an incomplete understanding of information.

It's really this obsession with certainty that keeps getting people into trouble.

My own world view is based on uncertainty and knowing that there is a vast, almost infinite, quantity of unknown stuff out there. I think the two concepts are not equivalent.

And yet, there are people with limited resources, time or intellectual abilities for which this is not feasable.

I think you're correct to say that you shouldn't take what experts say as gospel. But every individual's time and resources are limited; if I had to verify the result of everything I read from first principles, I would be doing literally nothing else with my life (no time to eat or sleep, either).

People need to do their best to judge how trustworthy a source is, and make their own decisions, but remain open to conflicting information if their trustworthy sources are later found to be wrong. And people also need to accept that any decision they make based on that information isn't 100% certain.

I think we’re in agreement

The experts mostly aren't giving advice on the same way as your local church, but people that say "experts say X" are.

I don't have time to read every paper published, which is why we have people we call experts. The hope is that by having published papers public, other experts will read it and kick up a stink if there are egregious errors. Up until that point, to get on with life it is necessary to make a decision if the subject is relevant to our choices.

It is exactly like OSS. Not every user can audit the code, nor should we expect them to. But it's there and we hope that someone is.

It seems to me that "believe experts" is somewhat analogous to Catholicism, and the contrary to Protestantism.

And I think that Christians over the centuries have had very good critiques of both amid the wars and persecutions.

The experts are not necessarily reliable, may be corrupt, need to have checks and balances.

But the average person is not as smart, not as educated, and can be led astray.

It's a never ending conflict because there is no simple answer as to which is best.

Nutritional science is particularly bad. Trans fats were considered the healthy alternative to saturated fats, salt has been made a boogeyman on shaky gorunds, eggs have flipped between being considered healthy and unhealthy a few times, and the food pyramid/low fat movement pushed carb heavy diets that contributed to the obesity epidemic.

> imagine a society where people are actually held accountable for spreading bullshit disinformation, wouldn't that be a net good?

Who decides that it’s bullshit though? The government? Or maybe interested-party-backed “fact checkers”?

Court

Well, unless you hold the opposite position where nothing is bullshit and everything is equally valuable, _somebody_ has to be able to decide.

Not if you subscribe to the idea that things without or even net negative value should be legal to share.

I will claim that after a certain negative threshold, some things should not be legal to be share in all forums.

Accepting that, it becomes a question of where do you draw that line.

I would surmise the traditional belief of western philosophy thusly:

1) I do not have perfect knowledge. 2) Good, or at least better, ideas will implicitly produce better results over long periods. 3) It is immoral to control the lives of others. 4) Therefore, people can argue for ideas they find compelling, and people are free to choose what they think is best. 5) Furthermore, people must bear the consequences of their decisions.

A further part of this system was that it was necessary for society to be structured such that individual choices do not have an outsized impact on others. This required that the apparatus of the state have specific constraints. It was quite a remarkable belief system, and much has been written about it over centuries.

> A further part of this system was that it was necessary for society to be structured such that individual choices do not have an outsized impact on others

Technology has changed that rather dramatically.

Okay, but we still have systems in place that routinely make decisions based on determinations about factual statements. There are obvious ones, like determining whether someone murdered someone else, or determining how much money someone made for the purposes of taxation. We don’t just throw up our hands and say “sure, maybe there is objective reality out there, but even if there is, who could possibly decide what is real?”

The government. This is basically a lese-majeste case, so the person you're criticizing has the authority to declare the criticism slander.

> The government. This is basically a lese-majeste case, so the person you're criticizing has the authority to declare the criticism slander.

Not true. Defamation suits still have to go through due process in the courts.

Yes, it would be great to not have people spread bullshit information. But how would you accomplish it? By having "official fact-checkers" censoring information, but that's an appallingly terrible idea, many times worse than the current state of affairs. So the imperfect situation we have now is preferable to another many times worse.

>>imagine a society where people are actually held accountable for spreading bullshit disinformation, wouldn't that be a net good?

That largely depends on who is choosing what is "disinformation", normally if government (or corporations) is involved "disinformation" normally becomes "things that we do not like" which would not be a net good

You're comparing apples and oranges. What works on the micro political level (Singapore) doesn't necessarily work at the macro political level (Canada). This is also why I can vote for Republicans in the state government and Democrats in the federal government and still sleep soundly every night.

That being said the court case in question is draconian.

FWIW the population of Canada is only 6x Singapore, so definitely bigger but not irreconcilably larger.

I think one of the bigger things that makes Singapore so much easier to govern with consensus is the density. It's 5.7 million people packed onto a 30x20km island. There isn't much in the way of urban/rural divide or of different federal-level divisions having competing resource concerns, etc.

Maybe city states aren’t that bad of an idea, after all.

> imagine a society where people are actually held accountable for spreading bullshit disinformation, wouldn't that be a net good?

Sure, but who cares? Just doing what is a 'net good' isn't a good enough yard stick for whether you should actually do it.

Imagine a society where the weak or infirm are culled at [or before] birth. Wouldn't that be a net good? (Answer: we already went there. Hitler thought the American idea of Eugenics was such a great idea that he made it a major priority of his government)

> we don't have a hardline free speech movement like the USA

A lot of places have movements where people want more free speech. Just like us. The difference is, we were lucky enough to actually succeed. And it really was luck.

There is this myth that we have always just naturally revered free speech. The reality is that our country has only recently evolved its position. Up until the early 20th century, Americans were regularly convicted for defamation of the government (or speech that wasn't in the government's interests), particularly through and after WWI. Then one Supreme Court justice changed his opinion on free speech, and set the whole country on a course to re-interpret the limits of the First Amendment. We can only legally say "Fuck the USA" during wartime, or even salute a Communist flag (at any time), because that one Justice changed his mind.

If one person changing their mind moved us forward, it could also go the other way. And the same could be true for your country.

> the average person can't be expected to have a fact checking department on staff to verify every link they share with their social media friends.

I think perhaps this is a misrepresentation of the requirement (that exists even in places like Singapore) that one be skeptical by default of any claim made by the media.

"Cui bono?"

Penalties for what the court system deems misinformation absolutely do not solve the problem: indeed they make it worse.

" for spreading bullshit disinformation"

Why do you suggest that criticizing the government is BS and disinformation?

That's not what is made illegal.

Legitimate criticism is.

There's a world of difference.

>"I'm from Canada so we don't have a hardline free speech movement like the USA"

I'm in Canada as well an while I do not like many things in the US when comparing to Canada I am absolutely on their side when it comes to things like freedom of speech and things like Bill of Rights.

Formally due to notwithstanding clause I do not think we have any rights at all as the government basically can override our rights any time it feels like. Sure it does not do it every other Monday but still it's been used something like 15 times and recently our provincial wizards like Legault and Ford just showed what does this Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms mean for them - apparently zilch.

I'm also Canadian but to be fair American Freedom of Speech and the Bill of Rights is also violated whenever the government wants to. People have been put to death or jailed for being certain protests or screening anti-war movies. Not recently at least overtly, but nothing changed so this is still possible.