Comment by wzwy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wzwy | Hacker News Reader

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Sometimes I wonder if we should try building a news site optimised for seeing the effect of appeals to authority.

To write an article for the site, we would need to:

1. Write a headline with no mentions of any experts.

2. Write another headline mentioning at least one expert in it.

3. Write the content without mentioning any experts.

4. Write the content and sprinkle names of experts as needed.

5. Publish.

Now, the reader would then:

1. Be exposed to the no-experts version of the article - both headline and content.

2. Once finished, the reader will be prompted to write their thoughts on the article.

3. Click “Reveal”.

4. The reader would then skim or read the whole article again, but this time it would mention the experts.

5. Prompt the reader to evaluate how their thoughts had changed after reading the expert version of the article.

I’m so gullible, seeing experts in anything especially when names of prestigious institutions or titles are tacked onto them, tend to shut down the reasoning part of my brain altogether.

Bear in mind, the site I proposed is not a place to police how articles should be written; rather, it’s all about increasing its readers’ awareness on how much mentions of an authority can impact their initial reasoning and judgement and sometimes make them stop reasoning at all. My view is that mentions of an authority are useful for calibrating our judgements after we tried to reason on our own but not before that.

And yeah, I have no opinion on the original post. Just like to go off on a tangent once in a while.

There is value in knowing what experts say. I and 99% of people in IT will never be in position to evaluate if quantum computing is feasible or not. The only thing we can do is try to evaluate expert's credibility and pick a side so to speak.

The same goes for health advice but this time it's 99.9%+ - if you're not in the field you can just listen and hope you are good at estimating who is more credible or likely to do better research or more truthful claims. Trying to evaluate them yourself is a recipe for being wrong and creating your own bubble.

If the article says: random guy X says quantum computing is a scam because Y there is nothing I can take away from it because it's very easy to make Y both incorrect and plausible sounding to me. If I know it's Oxford physics professor who makes the claim I can learn that Y is at least serious enough reason to not be easily dismissed.

Appeal to authority is bad as an argument when people knowledgeable in the field try to debate a certain point. In other cases it's very useful to know who makes the claims and very often it's the only thing that gives the claims credibility.

I love the idea.

I've always wondered if the format of long form expert opinions could be replaced by a knowledge graph that is independent of the expert.

E.g. instead of article "Economist John rejects minimum wage"

Root node "Minimum wage is not the best solution to problem x" -> because -> <node to define problem>, <node to define alternative solutions> -> because -> <leaf nodes of studies or models>

In this way other experts could add to the graph and the differences between different branches of argument could be more easily compared or automatically updated. Articles could still be written, but could reference specific nodes or edges of the graph which adds clarity to the discussion.

I've thought about this before, but notating as a structure that needs logical supports instead of a graph.

When you say logical supports, do you mean something like "A because B and C"? Why is this better than a graph?

If you can't tell I don't know much about formal logic. Apologies for the naive questions.

Well, I don’t know, I do think that expert opinions can carry weight. Like: “according to Dr Malcolm Alan of the department of geology at Harvard university, this kind of rock usually indicates…”. I mean knowing that a professor of geology said that is evidence that a fact is true, isn’t it?

Not necessarily true if the "expert" goes against most other experts.

Having done that, you could then write a paper on your findings. You would then be an expert! You could then rerun the experiment using your paper as the story in order to validate your initial findings…

Appeals to findings/evidence would be different, nah?

> 5. Prompt the reader to evaluate how their thoughts had changed after reading the expert version of the article.

Basing the perceived quality of an article on an appeal to authority doesn't make much sense either.

The Royal Society's motto is literally "take nobody's word for it."

To be pedantic, their motto is literally Nullius in verba which translates as you describe.

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