Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhedwards | Hacker News Reader

> "Experts" are just people with their own inherent biases

I get where you're going here, and I don't totally disagree, but that's not "just" what experts are. Typically experts are people who have spent far more time than other people doing exactly what you're describing: slowly sifting through and cross-referencing data, asking questions, digging up resources, and testing hypothesis.

It's good to be skeptical, and it's important to understand that experts have bias too, but there's a difference between someone who has passively consumed information in a biased manner and an expert who has dedicated real research to arrive at their viewpoint. Being able to consume and be critical of information from biased experts while still benefiting from and being enriched by their knowledge and expertise (instead of disregarding it because you disagree) is I think the crown jewel of "critical thinking".

View on HN

> Typically experts are people who have spent far more time than other people doing exactly what you're describing: slowly sifting through and cross-referencing data, asking questions, digging up resources, and testing hypothesis.

One thing to note though is that the less mature a field is, the more gaps there will be an expert's knowledge/models. Doctors in the 1940s were regarded as medical experts, and yet many were actively promoting cigarettes. History is littered with "experts" whose expertise was outrageously wrong or misguided in hindsight.

So I say people should judge experts by the maturity of their field and in the context they are providing expertise on.

A civil engineer is giving expertise on whether a building will collapse or not? You'll likely get extremely reliable expertise you can count on.

A doctor is promoting a glass of wine a day for health reasons? Take it with a grain of salt.

but that the best advice we can get now

Be careful: that salt will give you high blood pressure! Or not, depending on which medical "expert" turns out to be correct.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find an actual expert who would make the general claim that salt consumption will cause high blood pressure, as opposed to a claim that some people are salt-sensitive, or that high salt diets are positively correlated with high blood pressure, or something else.

Part of the problem is that non-experts tend to summarize expert information in ways that alter or omit crucial points, and then people are disappointed when the crib notes version tends to be inaccurate.

Yes I was being somewhat flippant. Besides genetic susceptibility, the current research indicates that the issue with salt is more due to osmolality than quantity.

https://peterattiamd.com/rickjohnson/

And yet the medical experts still get it wrong by oversimplifying the issue and making dietary recommendations based on quantity.

https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/high-blood-pressure/c...

I had a discussion about this with a doctor. I asked them for their opinions on sodium to potassium ratios by age group and sodium loss through sweat. I got blank stares and the subject changed. I've had far more fascinating and informative discussions with nutritionists and fitness coaches, not to suggest they are a definitive source of knowledge. I find it ultimately best to research things on my own and take all scientific papers with a skeptical grain of salt.

A physician probably learns the physiology of sweat glands, mechanisms for how the human body regulates sodium and potassium, and diseases caused by regulatory mechanisms not working. Unless they had an interest or read a study, I’m not sure I would expect a physician to know that, and in my experience a lot of physicians are reluctant to speculate.

Nutritionists and fitness coaches are much more willing to speculate in my experience, with the caveat that they may not have the same education as a scientist as a physician does.

To be fair, an expert not answering a question that they don't know the answer to is a good outcome. The real expert for your question would be a researcher in the specific field, or perhaps the rare doctor who has taken an interest in following such research.

I had been cutting caffeine out of my life for awhile. Ended on ER where they stuck an actual bag of caffeine to my IV. Felt like I was in a comic.

Also that much caffeine really sucks.

Are you implying that salt does not raise blood pressure? Because I am pretty sure you are wrong. But be free to share RCT's showing it is indeed a false association.

Your surety is misplaced and unfortunately you're not even asking the right question. The relationship between salt and blood pressure is a complex, multi-factorial issue which can't be adequately summarized in a comment here. The best explanation I've heard is this interview with Rick Johnson, MD who is one of the most prominent researchers in that field. It's long but worth a listen.

https://peterattiamd.com/rickjohnson/

I don't really care how complex it is. Split people between two groups, offer food with half the salt to one group and see what happens. No need to overcomplicate.

One issue is the undisclosed interests. Something tells me that doctors who were promoting cigarettes were paid to do so. Just like we've seen experts saying that oil /CO2 has nothing to do with climate change or health issues. This kind of collusion should bring criminal charges both to the experts and to the ultimate party that funded the misleading research.

The other issue is the lack of education and basic critical thinking among a high proportion of population so you find yourself in a world full of conspiracy theories and fake information. For some reasons I thought this issue can be found only in 3rd world countries but covid openned my eyes...

So, here's the challenge.

A doctor is promoting vaccinating your child from COVID?. Should that also be taken with a grain of salt?

What about measles?

How do you draw the line?

How do you help others - suspicious of authority, and being actively manipulated in a culture war to distrust anything a "progressive" tells them - to draw the line?

I think it's impossible. The only way is to say that "Doctors are experts. They have been wrong before and they will be wrong again. Experts doesn't mean getting things 100% right. But it definitely means getting things more right than you, most of the time. So trust them, even if as new information develops, the advice will shift".

By the way both sides in the culture war believe this. FOX News finds their own experts. They find the 0.1% scientists that don't believe in climate change and give them 60% of the airtime. But they still appeal to experts.

> But it definitely means getting things more right than you, most of the time. So trust them, even if as new information develops, the advice will shift

You're advocating giving up all agency and placing 100% trust in a person. There are endless examples in human history as to why this is dangerous. There are very few as to why this is good. "Just trust me" is generally regarded as something said by a person you should not trust, and for good reason.

> How do you draw the line?

You do your best to evaluate the information on your own and find sources you trust. The latter is nearly impossible when an issue becomes political.

> find sources you trust

And those sources will consist of...who? Perhaps, people who have spent time and effort learning about the topic, a.k.a. "the experts"?

Spending a lot of time on one thing does not inherently make you trustworthy. I’m not sure what you’re getting at.

It makes you knowledgeable. You should pick knowledgeble people to trust on complicated topics and you shouldn't base that trust on if those people tell you what you want yo hear but on their ability to acknowledge nuance and change their minds when they see new data.

You’re starting to get it with your last points. There’s a lot of factors that go in to determining trustworthiness. Being knowledgeable is a prerequisite for trusting somebody.

> You're advocating giving up all agency and placing 100% trust in a person.

Not at all. Placing provisional trust in am expert about a specific opinion you are aware may change in the future is completely different from "giving up all agency" or "placing 100% trust in a person. Nothing in that advice tells you not to check the opinions of a few different experts to be sure you aren't being misled.

> The latter is nearly impossible when an issue becomes political.

It's not that hard. You find experts who seem to do a good job of acknowledging nuance and don't seem to be trying to make their facts fit a narrative.

What you don't do is trust someone because what they say on completely different topics matches what you believe or trust someone because they consistently give you the answers you want to hear. Doing either of those is worse than just blindly trusting experts.

> How do you draw the line?

Again, maturity of the thing the expertise revolves around is important here.

Since covid has been around less than 2 years and child-approved covid vaccines have been around for less than 1 year, I'd take a recommendation to vaccinate my kid against covid with a grain of salt. Especially since covid itself does not appear to impact children the same way it does adults (<0.03% of covid deaths have been children, etc.). Since covid is a highly politicized topic at the moment it's hard to tell if the doctor is recommending the vaccine because he actually feels it's beneficial vs. recommending the vaccine because despite feeling like it's not terribly beneficial, he's feeling pressure from governments to push the vaccine because they want to get kids back into schools.

Measles vaccines have been around over 50 years, have a proven utility and track record, and are not currently politicized. Plus measles is way more deadly to kids than covid, so in that case it's more cut and dry.

So my philosophy is to take covid-related advice with a grain of salt until the expertise around it is more mature. I think in 5 years we will have a much better idea of how necessary child covid vaccines really are (as well as how necessary cloth masks really are, etc.).

By the way, when I say "take with a grain of salt", I don't mean "don't give your kid the covid vaccine". I mean "Probably still give the kid covid vaccine but reserve the right to harbor doubts that it's actually necessary and quietly suspect the current political climate is putting pressure on hospitals to push the vaccine regardless of the actual merits of the vaccine"

> being actively manipulated in a culture war

People you disagree with aren't the only ones being manipulated.

Not every subject needs to be "both sided". In the modern progressive/conservative divide, there is no pure synchronicity between how people of different political persuasions approach their support of ideas. Namely: One group stays pretty consistent with their preferences; The other shifts position depending on who's proposing it.

The Data: https://np.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/7hjdap/the_last_pr...

'field maturity' could perhaps say something about the likeliness of trustworthy information/advice overall, but says nothing about the trustworthiness of the expert themselves.

in fact, the nominative 'expert' is a political injection, practically begging for appeal to authority to shut down critical thinking. expertise has little correlation to trustworthiness, given that it typically gets overwhelmed by the politically-interwined 'esteem'.

there is no shortcut to doing the hard work of triangulating the best information out of many biased opinions, including so-called 'experts'[0]. this is true of news, reviews, and commentary of all sorts.

[0]: similarly noted in a different context here, along with it's grandparent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29678221

Right, and part of the problem with an "ah, who can know the truth" approach is that it absolutely will be weaponized by bad faith actors. It's really easy to be loud and persistent with a lie if no one calls it out because "who knows, really".

A parallel to this is something I saw in Italy where a number of people complain that "all the politicians are corrupt". This provides cover for the really rotten politicians, because it puts the ones shoveling money to their cronies in the same category as the basically honest guy who's trying his best to actually do something positive for his constituents.

“the problem with an "ah, who can know the truth" approach is that it absolutely will be weaponized by bad faith actors.”

So are pens. Do you have any idea of the magnitude of horrors that have been committed by the stroke of a pen? Should we ban pens?

It honestly makes me really nervous for the future. There is a LOT of distrust in experts that I see across the internet (and here in HN).

While there are bad actors, consensus is generally going to guide you closer to the truth than fringe experts. What does the community of experts who have studied this say about it? Is it something generally accepted by the experts or is it something that most experts disagree with?

It is nearly impossible that an entire field of study will succumb to bias. Climate change is the poster child here. Where experts disagree isn't that it is happening and caused by man, they disagree about the degree that it will be a problem (With all of them agreeing it's a major issue). Yet, I've often seen it claimed that those experts are all biased and this fringe expert funded by Koch research is really the one to be trusted (which, shocker, finds we should be burning MORE fossil fuels!)

Trust in scientists is too high when they keep pumping out studies that don't replicate, and don't publish the original data and methods used to reach conclusions.

I wholly trust science that independently replicates and the fact that it's missing from the process means much of what we see is less than wholly trustworthy.

Not all fields of science are created equal. Whether or not studies are replicated or data is available will depend entirely on the field of study.

Certainly, a lot of the social sciences and "soft" sciences have a fair bit of replication/data problems. That said, the biomedical, environmental, geologic, and chemical sciences by and large have really solid data and repeats of that data. The areas of sciences we have a harder time controlling for are those where it'd be unethical to get better data and examples (nutritional science, for example).

There are far too many fields of study to lump all science into the same bucket and call it all untrustworthy.

A bigger problem is that scientific journalism treats every study as being equal. When, in fact, some studies are far better than others and carry a much larger weight of truth.

> Not all fields of science are created equal.

But FB, and other platforms, treat them as if they are when making their decisions on what to censor. FB even trusts so called "independent fact checkers," who don't even claim to be scientists and write mostly on political topics, to act as arbiters of truth.

> A bigger problem is that scientific journalism treats every study as being equal.

And it's these journalists that FB is relying on for its determination of fact, not the actual scientists.

Then stop censoring. Look at what happened in this post. Experts said X, the author said Y, and Y was censored because it disagreed with the experts. Later the experts admitted that X was incorrect. Of course, the experts, who ended up being wrong faced no consequences, while the author who ended up being right was censored. The experts are essentially a privileged class whose opinions are considered to be true by default, and when they get things wrong, it is assumed that this is just a good faith mistake, and forgiven. Everybody else is assumed to be wrong by default, and spreading politically motivated misinformation. When they are right it is assumed to be a fluke and swept under the rug. In this environment the only logical response is to mistrust the appointed "experts." If they are what they say they are let them defend their point against all challengers.

> Then stop censoring.

And stop dissembling. For instance, Fauci's early statements on mask-wearing were calculated to preserve the supply of N95 masks for medical personnel. However laudable the intent, it betrays what I imagine is an endemic world-view that the masses must be manipulated, rather than dealt with honestly.

This morning, an NPR report about the new CDC quarantine guidelines acknowledged criticisms/allegations of corporate lobbying for the policy change and internal fears of staffing for critical services, which was followed-up by a "follow the science" platitude.

Facebook's actions keep being cast as if there is a completely open, level, neutral field that the censorious fact checkers are now distorting. But that's not the starting point. Facebook already has its thumb -- if not both hands and an elbow! -- on the scale, as far as what content is dispersed. The view is distorted to begin with, by Facebook choosing what is promoted and what is not.

They may not be doing a particularly good job un-distorting it, but it's not a choice between pure and free exchange of information and censorship. It is between whether Facebook is going to manipulate in both directions -- promoting and taking down -- or just one.

(Note that I don't think either of these choices are particularly good. I would prefer that Facebook did neither.)

Expert consensus has some value, but it's often too subject to inertia and fails to adjust fast enough to new evidence. Up until 1982 the medical experts told us that peptic ulcers were caused by stress and spicy food. Except that was totally wrong.

https://www.news-medical.net/health/Peptic-Ulcer-History.asp...

What else could they be wrong about today? Often when you really dig into consensus statements you find that they're based on a handful of old studies which don't really meet modern evidence based medicine criteria.

The problem I have with statements like these is they focus on the misses while ignoring hits.

Expert consensus says that washing hands prevents the spread of disease. It's been like that since the 1950s. Has that consensus been wrong?

What about the expert consensus that azithromycin is an effective treatment against (most strains of) streptococcus? Is that consensus wrong?

You are correct, expert consensus will be wrong at times and it will take a fairly large push and evidence to change course. However, for every example of the experts "getting it wrong" there are 100s if not 1000s where you are better off following the consensus. Further, as time goes on, the process of developing consensus improves itself. It looks for faults that lead to bad conclusions and corrects for those faults in future studies.

It is a truth that experts and their consensuses will be wrong. However, if I follow and accept what a strong expert consensus says about something in that field of study 99% or even 99.99% of the time, they will be right. Or said another way, if you make the claim that "This expert consensus is wrong" You'll be right 0.01% of the time and wrong 99.99% of the time. Unless you are an expert in that field of study and you have a bunch of very strong research backing the claim, you've got no footing to really go against the consensus.

“Expert consensus says that washing hands prevents the spread of disease. It's been like that since the 1950s. Has that consensus been wrong?”

WRT Covid, yes that advice was wrong and has been abandoned as Covid isn’t spread by surface transmission.

> The problem I have with statements like these is they focus on the misses while ignoring hits.

That's how trust works. It only takes 1 miss to lose it.

The issue isn't that experts are wrong or change their stance when the data changes. That isn't a problem and is exactly how things should work.

The issue is when politicians and leaders treat "expert opinion" as settled truth. Our decisions and policies need to be crafted knowing that experts are wrong and the situation changes when the data changes. Instead, politicians and leaders hold up expert opinion as settled and let the blame fall on the scientists, researchers, etc. when they "miss". If their work was not co-opted by politicians there would be no issue.

> That's how trust works. It only takes 1 miss to lose it.

No, that’s only how things work when you are looking for a pretense to ignore expert advice.

How am I supposed to judge expert advice if I lack the technical knowledge? Blind trust?

What else can you do? Really? How can you trust or distrust expert advice without the technical knowledge?

Most of the reasons for distrust I've seen have basically boiled down to "I don't like what the expert is saying" or "They were wrong once, obviously all experts are wrong about everything".

It’s definitely a soft skill, but roughly for me it’s: - assumes good faith - doesn’t attempt to control others - doesn’t show disdain of their out group

Obviously knowing somebody personally makes this much easier.

I agree that expert consensus is more often right than wrong. However you have no scientific basis for claiming that they are right 99% of the time. You just made up that number. In fact the actual accuracy rate is unknown, and indeed unknowable.

My subjective impression is that expert accuracy rates vary widely by scientific field. High energy particle physicists might actually be hitting 99.99%. Psychologists and nutritionists might not even be at 50%. Epidemiologists are somewhere in the middle.

Experts lose credibility when they make sweeping recommendations based on flawed or limited research rather than remaining silent as they should. Once trust is lost it takes a generation to regain.

given that knowledge is practically infinite (bounded only by the expanse of the universe), you'd actually expect the correctness of scientific consensus to asymptotically approach 0. that is, we're waaaaaay more wrong than right, and waaaaay more often, before we get it right, especially as knowledge gets more fractally intricate and expansive.

That'd only be true if expert consensus covered all knowledge. It doesn't, nor does it opine on all possible knowledge.

Saying correctness approaches 0 because knowledge is effectively infinite would be like saying our ability to do math correctly is 0 because there are an infinite amount of numbers. Or, that our ability to write correct software is 0 because there are infinite possible programs.

no, those are not analogous at all. knowability is literally a subset of all knowledge, which pushes into a void that expands faster than we can enumerate. it's hubris to think otherwise.

> you'd actually expect the correctness of scientific consensus to asymptotically approach 0

Scientific consensus correctness is calculated as true assertions / all assertions.

If we stopped making assertions, today, the scientific consensus correctness would be fixed at whatever level it is at. The amount of knowledge that hasn't been studied has no bearing on the correctness of scientific consensus. That's a number that is finite with a denominator squarely fixed by the number of assertions that happen as human knowledge expands.

The assertion 1 + 1 = 2 will always be true. If that was the only assertion the scientific community ever made and had consensus over then they'd be at 100% correctness. It doesn't matter that you can also calculate 1 + 2, or 3 + 5, or an infinite number of numerical combinations. The denominator is the assertions, not the unasserted assertions. It doesn't matter that knowledge is "fractile" or whatever. Because, assertions by the scientific community are pretty much always couched as "Given the current data, this model fits best". Newtonian physics isn't "incorrect" it's incomplete. This is the same for most knowledge with that "fractile" understanding.

The only way you approach 0 is if our fundamental understanding of reality is completely fundamentally flawed, but then, that'd be an unknowable knowledge.

that's trying to artificially constrain knowledge in a way so that your prior assertion is true (reminiscent of the incompleteness theorem). that's a common way that people become simultaneously self-certain and wrong.

scientific consensus has no hope of outrunning even what humans in general know, let alone every scientific conjecture ever made, most of which aren't disproven, but rather merely discarded. and all that is a tiny speck next to everything that's within reach of human knowledge, which is miniscule next to everything that could ever be known but is forever beyond our reach. it really does approach 0 at the limit.

I'm not "constraining knowledge" I'm not saying it isn't theoretically infinite. I'm saying that the amount of knowledge has no barring on whether or not an assertion is true.

Further, the scenario of this entire thread is about current and future scientific consensus, not past consensus. The fact that protoscience said that that you need to balance the 4 humors to cure illness does not affect current scientific consensus which soundly rejects that notion.

The number of assertions we have scientific consensus on is finite. The number of those assertions which are true is a finite number. The infinite nature of knowledge does not change that ratio because, again, we aren't making assertions about everything that is knowable.

The entire point of this conversation is "What is more likely true, what the experts say or something else?". You are making the claim that because scientists don't know what every atom in the sun is doing, they can't correctly say that the sun will rise in the morning. Because, their knowledge of the sun is an infinitesimally small percentage of everything there is to know about the sun.

My point is, scientists aren't making assertions about what every quark in the sun will do. They aren't making assertions about the temperature of every square inch of the sun. The assertions they are making are far more broad and, shocker, likely 90+% true. Which circles back to my main point. If an expert tells you "The surface of the sun is roughly 6000C" That's a correct statement.

If you aren't going to address this in your next comment then don't bother because I'm done with this. You are being purposefully obtuse.

> However you have no scientific basis for claiming that they are right 99% of the time. You just made up that number. In fact the actual accuracy rate is unknown, and indeed unknowable.

> My subjective impression is that expert accuracy rates vary widely by scientific field. High energy particle physicists might actually be hitting 99.99%. Psychologists and nutritionists might not even be at 50%. Epidemiologists are somewhere in the middle.

All fair points that I don't really disagree with.

> Experts lose credibility when they make sweeping recommendations based on flawed or limited research rather than remaining silent as they should. Once trust is lost it takes a generation to regain.

I don't think it's quiet as binary. I agree, they should limit recommendations based on the data and be very open when "the data is limited and more information could change our recommendation".

But I don't think that means they need to be silent when data is limited, just careful with communication.

Health experts are in the worst position for this sort of thing. In a pandemic situation, data will simply be limited and action required to prevent lose of life. You can't just sit back and do nothing.

But, I'd agree that you need to be very open and frank about why you are taking actions and how confident you are that the actions you are taking will be effective. COVID hasn't been handled perfectly in that regard, but it could be worse.

As for trust and credibility, I think a major social issue we have is that we are quick to distrust experts over being wrong or mistepping on any given issue but for some reason we are extremely forgiving of religious leaders and politicians that repeat platitudes we agree with. I'm not advocating for blind trust in experts, but I wish it wasn't so reactionary, where any wrong statement causes people to lose all trust in expert credibility. That's not something I could control anyways.

Actually action is not required. In the medical field if you aren't legitimately confident about the effects of a particular action, both positive and negative, then it's better to sit back and do nothing (while conducting additional research).

"First, do no harm" is a fundamental principle of medical ethics. Unfortunately iatrogenic harm from over treatment is still a serious cause of injuries and deaths. The default should always be to do nothing unless there is clear and reliable evidence to support intervention. That applies equally to pandemics as to other situations.

https://www.nap.edu/catalog/9728/to-err-is-human-building-a-...

I understand that politicians might sometimes have to take rapid actions based on political factors. But don't deceive the populace by falsely claiming those actions are supported by scientific consensus.

I worked first hand in a research group. the 'experts' are extremely political, and anything that doesn't fit their political agenda is ignored, and if the study/experiment doesn't fit their political agenda they keep trying or fudging the data until it does. I'll give you an example,

I noticed a map of obesity overlaps very well with a map of diabetes. high alcohol consumption mapped very well with the areas the prior map didnt correlate. in other words, in areas where obesity was not correlated with diabetes, there was high alcohol consumption. paper worthy or worth looking into? no. I lied to a different section of the group and said these were areas of increased correlation, and it wasn't alcohol but soda consumption. They immediately wanted to seek grants to write papers.

You can see how this leads to junk science. if you ignore things that dont fit your political agenda and only research things that fit your agenda, that's junk science. it gets worse because when the data doesnt suggest the political agenda pushed, they try to 'account' for other factors or re-run the study in a different way until it says what they wanted it to say. worse case, it doesnt get published.

The experts are not to be trusted.

Is that related to the “reproduction crisis” science is going through right now?

yes because results are jelly beaned. If you keep changing what to measure for success criteria until you get what you want, you are more likely reject the null hypothesis even though you should not have OR if you dont publish results that doesnt fit your political bias, the 1/20 ones that do get published and also incorrectly rejected the null hypothesis

> It is nearly impossible that an entire field of study will succumb to bias

It's happened before, especially when a select few command the majority of the field's grants/publications. If you are interested in how this could happen, here's an example of where basically the entirety of the Alzheimer's disease research field of study succumbed to bias:

https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarte...

as well as the HN discussion on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21911225

Experts have spent more time tuning their biases. If someone claims to be free of bias then they dont understand training sets and inheritance.

> there's a difference between someone who has passively consumed information in a biased manner and an expert who has dedicated real research to arrive at their viewpoint.

Which camp does the fact checker fall into?

But fact-checkers aren’t experts. And experts don’t claim their research conclusions as facts.

There are astrology “experts”. The idea that someone is an expert is very difficult to establish. Many times I discover that “expert” doctors who give public health advice don’t understand the difference between correlation and causation. Experts are made in a biased environment. Those who could get rid of their biases would probably be filtered out by that same environment.

>Typically experts are people who have spent far more time than other people doing exactly what you're describing: slowly sifting through and cross-referencing data, asking questions, digging up resources, and testing hypothesis.

Are we still talking about Facebook fact checking experts?

Yes. What most laypeople don't understand is that finding cracks in the work of experts has real rewards for other experts, because of the scientific method. Therefore, it is unlikely that a layperson will find those cracks first.

I served as a juror on a criminal case, in which the prosecution seemed to want to make a big deal out of DNA evidence found on some clothing. In turn, the defense wanted to dispose of that evidence by having an expert say that DNA evidence was unreliable. The expert they brought in was someone who admitted their knowledge of the field was only based on an article they read.

So the percentage of experts who spend real research on a question appears to be less than 100.

There is a long, sad history of trial courts improperly convicting defendants based on pseudoscience testimony by "expert" witnesses. We now know that forensic analysis of things like hair samples and bite marks is mostly bullshit. Even fingerprint and ballistic analysis has a high error rate. Unfortunately jurors often assign expert witnesses a level of credibility that they don't deserve.

For sure, but that's not at all how fact checking is implemented today. Most of the critique is related to the silencing, discrediting and deplatforming of reporters and professionals (i.e. experts by your definition) that express a different interpretation or selection of data. Even if it was enforced through gate-keeping by merit, it would still be massively subject to bias and political capture.

It's abundantly clear that fact-checking is at best using Western authority consensus, which is much more narrow than even scientific consensus, which itself has a majorly flawed track record in recent history.

What fact checking is effectively doing is treating information, debate and ideas as a form of hazardous material, too dangerous to be freely exchanged, unless certified by chain of custody through the supply chain of truths. Independently of the do-gooders' commandable intents, the result is predictably Orwellian. The systems, processes and bureaucracies for policing speech are rapidly expanding during this pandemic, see e.g. the Trusted News Initiative[1] and check their partner list. (There are of course countless other moving pieces.)

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2020/trusted-news-initiative...

Jamie Metzl lays out an incredible delusional narrative constructed by health experts about the Pangolin/intermediate host theory for Sars-COV-2 origins, 4 hours of in-depth discussion, highly recommend. Experts made a U-turn but not because of typical respectful scientific protocol of discovering new facts (and therefore changing their minds), but rather due to peer-pressure, politics and group-think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K78jqx9fx2I

But the problem is that expertise is used to shut down debate...that is the reason why it is controversial.

People do not disbelieve experts because they think they are experts themselves. They disbelieve experts because the argument today is: I am an expert, I am right, if you disagree with me you are likely a danger to other people.

What has changed is the attitude of "experts" to other people. And I say "experts" because it is also increasingly common for people who have expertise in one subject to claim that they have expertise in another subject, and use that authority to elevate their claims beyond contention.

It isn't about scepticism or some kind of re-interpretation of scientific truth...it is one group of people attempting to use their authority to force through their view of what society should be like. If you want to see what the looks like, China is led by "experts"...it isn't pretty. I think Covid has brought this to the fore because you have scientific "experts" ruling on societal and political issues, not because people necessarily disbelieve those claims (ofc, experts and politicians are very clear to make this unclear...they want you to believe that the people who oppose them are lunatics, they aren't, they are rarely people who deny Covid is occurring or deny vaccines work...they just have different political views which suggest different solutions to those problems...there are no experts in politics, that is why we have voting, "experts" today are attempting to shut down debate, shut down politics, and would shut down voting if given the chance).

Also, another big issue is that experts undermine themselves. I can only speak to what is happening in the UK but experts here have made predictions that were fairly consistently untrue - https://data.spectator.co.uk/category/sage-scenarios - people did not disbelieve these predictions at the start, they disbelieve them now because the evidence is clear: the predictions are consistently wrong, and consistently used to justify a political decision that the "experts" want (one that has massive externalities in areas that the "experts" don't know about...paragraph 3 again). This happens, no-one can predict the future, no-one can predict the course of a pandemic 100%...but the problem is that the "experts" are saying: we can predict this, we are correct all the time...again, this is something totally different. Again, what has changed is the experts, not the people.

Have the spectator really not updated this page since October?

Poor form fellows, very poor form.

No, the page was created for "freedom day" (and the consistent predictions that it would unleash an apocalypse).

That makes more sense. It just surprises me that I've seen far more links to this page in the past few weeks than I ever did back then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com