Hacker News Reader

Comment by _up | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com