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Comment by coffeefirst | Hacker News Reader

Something I've noticed in the pandemic: there's a pretty big gap between what people remember "the experts" saying vs what, if you listened to one or two qualified professionals and kept them straight, actually said.

Individual experts—the good ones at least—seem to hold up pretty well even if they didn't see everything coming.

It's the widespread sampling of chyrons and faces that inevitably says everything all of the time and winds up looking incompetent.

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"Experts" is synomim for politization of topics and create obedience.

Real experts have name and surname yet in my country they created groups of experts all the time for politicians to confirm their ideas.

"The experts" say we must raise taxes (in my area only personal income can be up to 54% of your earnings). I do know experts, without the quotes, who are totally against this tax abuse.

Also, for some reason, I did not see any expert yet for the taxing stuff or the pandemic medical teams that were supposed to exist and we did not get even names or surnames of them. Strange to say the least...

Now extend this to all areas possible that have political intereset and this is basically what "experts" are: excueses used by politicians of all colors to convict nce people of their stuff.

From the book of Proverbs (in the Bible): "The wise man gets a lot of advice" (paraphrased).

One chapter later: "The fool listens to most of it" (also paraphrased).

If you don't have the time to sort it all out, don't listen to all the viewpoints. Society, collectively, is insane - it believes so many contradictory things that could not all possibly be true. You can't listen to society or "they say" as a guide. You'll get nonsense.

But part of this is on the news, especially television and internet news. They need a hot take for this hour to draw eyeballs. It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to be new and different. But if you're trying to follow it to learn what to do to protect yourself in the pandemic, it's a hopelessly self-contradictory jumble. People wind up saying "They lied to us! They're still lying to us!" The problem is that "they" - the "they" that the media present to us - is too big a set.

Now, individual experts still can be mistaken, give bad advice, or even lie. But no expert is as confused as the union of all the experts.

You don't believe in the "wisdom of the crowds" ?

Here is a set of people. On a given subject, the median position is likely to be at least reasonable. That's the "wisdom of the crowds".

Here is a set of experts. Within the area of their expertise, the median position is probably pretty close to right. The intersection of their views are almost certainly right (though it may be the empty set).

But what you can't do is take the union of the views of a set of people, and expect anything except a bizarre jumble of self-contradiction. And that's what the media gives us. (In fact, the media gives us the union, with extra emphasis added to the outliers, because those are "more interesting" and therefore attract more eyeballs.)

Wisdom of the crowds? Maybe. Wisdom of the media coverage of the crowds? No way.

Union vs. intersection vs. outlier weighting is a beautiful way to put this.

Yes it seems like a combination of magnifying and muddling information.

Say, for example, a cancer researcher makes a statement like "Red wine contains compounds that might protect from some cancers" - not very interesting as news. So it gets magnified to "Red wine CURES cancer".

Next, another expert says "excessive use of alcohol can increases the risk of certain cancers". Of course the news converts this to "Alcohol causes cancer".

Finally, combine these two messages and people quite understanderbly conclude that cancer experts have no idea if alcohol causes or cures cancer.

There is that, but it also seems to be true that a lot of scientific studies are done badly. A lesson of the pandemic seems to be that when doing a meta-analysis you need to make sure to avoid the low-quality and fraudulent studies.

This is why eyewitness testimony can be unreliable . People are sure someone said or believed something, or that there is a consensus about something, but this may not be true. Social media can make this worse, particularly by forming false consensuses about issues in which no such consensus may exist.

Some of this is a conflation of who the experts are, as well as hindsight bias on that question. If you look at say Fauci or Trevor Bedford's predictions, sure, they were pretty accurate (with some confusion in the middle of the pandemic when everything was confused). But if you take Rand Paul as your "expert" (also a medical doctor, but in a different specialty), you would've had a very different sense of what "the experts" were saying. And in the moment, you don't have the benefit of hindsight to judge the credibility of expert predictions, only their credentials.

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