You are not an expert!
I posted this elsewhere, but I thought it was worth reposting here.
A large part of these debates have boiled down to "how trustworthy is scientific consensus." Here's the thing, you (and I) are not an expert in most fields. Nobody is an expert in most fields. End of story. Therefore, when a system is in place where the experts can be fact-checked by peers, and where dissenting opinions eventually do percolate to the top, it is best to assume the results of that system are the "most correct" results. For that reasons, the most appropriate starting position in any of these disagreements is scientific consensus (if one exists).
That's not to say you should turn your brain off. Quite the opposite. When convincing, accurate information becomes available that counters the consensus opinion you need to weigh that against your original position (scientific consensus) and decide an appropriate new paradigm to accept. This rarely means discarding the scientific consensus however, because it was generally formed by experts and you are not an expert.
Let's consider a few case examples of very smart people (smarter than you and smarter than me) who stepped outside their expertise and proved to be very wrong.
Example 1: Linus Pauling:
He is the reason you probably believe that massive doses of vitamin C (a water soluble vitamin) can prevent or cure the common cold. Here's an article that accurate sums up fact-vs-fiction. Why did people believe him? He is a rare recipient of two Nobel Prizes: the chemistry prize and the peace prize. However, he wasn't a biologist.
Example 2: Albert Einstein:
Perhaps you've heard "God does not play dice with the universe" as being attributed to him. In fact, if you come from certain misinformed circles you may have even heard that quote incorrectly applied as an anti-evolution statement. It is in fact a statement of disbelief in quantum mechanics. Einstein was not only brilliant, but a physicist. Even in the domain of physics he was confronted by a truth that was beyond his ability to accept.
In short, unless you are much much smarter than Einstein and Linus Pauling, it is unlikely you will be able to fully understand, let alone contradict, the state of the art in any especially complex science. That's why you're better off trusting the experts.
A large part of these debates have boiled down to "how trustworthy is scientific consensus." Here's the thing, you (and I) are not an expert in most fields. Nobody is an expert in most fields. End of story. Therefore, when a system is in place where the experts can be fact-checked by peers, and where dissenting opinions eventually do percolate to the top, it is best to assume the results of that system are the "most correct" results. For that reasons, the most appropriate starting position in any of these disagreements is scientific consensus (if one exists).
That's not to say you should turn your brain off. Quite the opposite. When convincing, accurate information becomes available that counters the consensus opinion you need to weigh that against your original position (scientific consensus) and decide an appropriate new paradigm to accept. This rarely means discarding the scientific consensus however, because it was generally formed by experts and you are not an expert.
Let's consider a few case examples of very smart people (smarter than you and smarter than me) who stepped outside their expertise and proved to be very wrong.
Example 1: Linus Pauling:
He is the reason you probably believe that massive doses of vitamin C (a water soluble vitamin) can prevent or cure the common cold. Here's an article that accurate sums up fact-vs-fiction. Why did people believe him? He is a rare recipient of two Nobel Prizes: the chemistry prize and the peace prize. However, he wasn't a biologist.
Example 2: Albert Einstein:
Perhaps you've heard "God does not play dice with the universe" as being attributed to him. In fact, if you come from certain misinformed circles you may have even heard that quote incorrectly applied as an anti-evolution statement. It is in fact a statement of disbelief in quantum mechanics. Einstein was not only brilliant, but a physicist. Even in the domain of physics he was confronted by a truth that was beyond his ability to accept.
In short, unless you are much much smarter than Einstein and Linus Pauling, it is unlikely you will be able to fully understand, let alone contradict, the state of the art in any especially complex science. That's why you're better off trusting the experts.
Comments
The problem here is that experts are only humans.
The bigger problem I see is that people are trying to analyze expert/scientific opinion after it has gone through a filter. Trying to analyze AGW through the MSM filter is going to be worthless. Similarly, there's a blogsphere filter (multiple filters, actually, seattlebubble is one kind of filter, climateprogress is another kind of filter, the AGW skeptic websites are another kind of filter). There's also an Al Gore filter for AGW.
What I don't see from the AGW skeptics is any attempt to get past the filters and get to scientific/expert opinion. They're the ones that routinely slam on the MSM and slam on Al Gore, but they limit their critique of AGW to what has been filtered by those agents. There is an obvious GIGO problem here. If the MSM and Al Gore are so poor information sources, why are they relying on those sources instead of going to the primary scientific literature? Well, going to the primary scientific literature requires quite a bit more work. I'll be the first to admit that I rely on realclimate probably a lot more than I should, but at least there you've got recognizably scientific voices making recognizably scientific critiques of the primary scientific literature. Its typically a lot harder to read realclimate than it is to read climateprogress or seattlebubble though. You also can find some of the primary scientific literature on the web as well (e.g. http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/publication ... tivity.pdf is a good paper for everyone wondering about the relative contribution of solar forcing, volcanic activity and GHGs).
I also very rarely hear anyone make a critique of the primary scientific literature which has any substance either. So when it comes to something like the meehl article posted above you'll get responses like 'bah! its all based on models! they're all wrong! nobody understands climate!". Very rarely do I heard "meehl is relying on model X, which has flaws Y and Z, based on work done references A, B and C it would be better to use model Q". The latter analysis takes a lot more work, however, and people are generally overworked and intellectually lazy and its a lot easier to blog about opinions than to try to dig up facts (*guilty*).
No argument here. I think you missed my point a little, because you reiterated it during the rest of your post. My point was that we have a group of experts who fact check each other and who benefit from proposing radical alternatives if their alternative turns out to be true.
Unless you are willing to dedicate a lot of time to understanding something, your optimal first response should be to trust those expert opinions. They may be right or wrong, but they are more likely to be right than whatever it is you think. And if they are wrong, they tend to come around to the right view in fairly short order.
This was really meant as a rebuttal to some people on this board suggesting that scientific consensus is worthless and you are better off just assuming you know what's right and then going online until you find people who agree with you.
Yeah, I think that blindly trusting experts is bad, however. Its good to be skeptical and its good to question authorities and experts. Think about how many experts offered the opinion pre-2007 that housing prices never went down and that the worst that would happen would be zero appreciation.
The problem is that you really need to do your homework in order to question the experts. When I do my homework on housing and the economy I tend to differ from a lot of the experts. When I do my homework on climate change I tend to agree with the experts.
There seems to be a pattern occurring that people superficially investigate something where expert/popular/government/MSM opinion is all slanted one way, they then come to hold opinions that are opposed to the 'mainstream' and then later they're proven right. Once this happens to you enough times (e.g. War on Drugs, WMDs, Iraq, Housing Bubble, Tech Bubble, Bush Administration, Federal Reserve, etc) you start to think you're smarter than everyone else and an expert in everything and that any institutionalized position is wrong. But that doesn't actually follow. And you can play "follow the money" with the environmental/green movement and show that there's a profit motive in AGW, but that doesn't meant that AGW is wrong. You need to show that a given policy is wrong first, then the profit motive explains why there's so much incentive to jump off that particular cliff. All these kinds of heuristic approaches to political problems are there so that people can avoid doing their homework.
Excellent point. Interestingly, this entire thread is really about forms of cognitive bias. In particular we are talking about hindsight bias.
The only thing I'd contend with you (or perhaps not) is that it doesn't even take that many positive reinforcements for most people to assume they are smarter. I've seen articles from people who correctly noted the dotcom bubble by 1999, but missed the real estate bubble until it had already started to crash. A lot of these people would argue based on their one correct analysis (dotcom) that they are trusted resources in all things financial.
Also, people tend to forget, or outright dismiss the cases where they were in fact wrong. I bet if you measured things on the whole, that the vast majority of people are wrong more often then right when bucking general consensus. Which is in no way me advocating any specific consensus (queue Robroy attempting to shut the thread down by invoking the 1930s and 1940s).