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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24889 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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I wrote a much better comment a few minutes ago, but one of the cats I'm fostering because my girlfriend foisted them upon me jumped on my keyboard and deleted it. So I apologize in advance if this is a low effort comment.

I think that the distrust of experts on this site goes way too far. 99% of the topics experts agree on or are on places like Wikipedia are true. If you look up something like the Central Limit Theorem on Wikipedia the answer will be more or less correct. But most things are boring. The ideas we focus on that are controversial and we don't trust them on are ones that cause the experts to lose their minds over and lose the ability to be impartial. Some examples are HBD and Covid. But if you open up a biology textbook, you can take most of that knowledge to the bank.

I want to give an example of this guy I know who worked at Best Buy with me in college. He is a Muslim guy and the elusive moderate Muslim. He is more or less progressive on every topic. I saw him recently at a tech meetup in Austin and he more or less sounded like a straight up Jihadist. And I helped this guy get his job at a major networking company after he got his law degree as a project manager, so I can confirm I thought he was a rational and trustworthy person. Which he is, except on the Israel-Palestine issue. He literally can't be rational. I thin for "experts", this is the same thing. They literally can't be rational on a few issues and it causes them to act insane and make people lose trust in institutions.

I'll give a less controversial example. I have a CS degree and I worked for this company that sold software that helped people automate things. We'd get this guy on a call with potential customers after the sales people and sales engineers did their thing and he would just shit on Azure and AWS and how he could do this and that if they switched to Linux and open source and the customers hated it. I had to pull him aside I was like dude we make software that works with Azure wtf are you doing. He was incapable of putting that hammer and nail away. It was like who gives a shit if a company uses Microsoft but he literally couldn't be rational about it.

I think a lot of people default to something similar to Foucault's theories on knowledge and power where knowledge and power are so linked that they end up essentially being the same thing. I completely agree with him, and I think power and knowledge combine to influence, manipulate and create NPCs that don't think. But in the case of experts, I think it is their biases causing this top down gas lighting instead of anything from the regime. The simplest and most likely answer is these people just believe this stuff due to ideology and are incredibly biased on hot culture war issues. It's not a conspiracy, they literally just can't think about these issues rationally.

I think that the distrust of experts on this site goes way too far. 99% of the topics experts agree on or are on places like Wikipedia are true. If you look up something like the Central Limit Theorem on Wikipedia the answer will be more or less correct. But most things are boring. The ideas we focus on that are controversial and we don't trust them on are ones that cause the experts to lose their minds over and lose the ability to be impartial. Some examples are HBD and Covid. But if you open up a biology textbook, you can take most of that knowledge to the bank.

Using your own examples: in 2020 it would have just been HBD. Now it's "HBD...and a global pandemic". Am I supposed to be relieved that they can still be rational about stellar mechanics and calculus but not an actual global health emergency? If I had told you ahead of time that we can't trust the experts on an upcoming pandemic, would you see me as going too far?

And I bet, a decade ago, there would be no controversy over the sex binary. Now I'm seeing publications like SciAm flirt with nonsense on this topic.

Who said this is a fixed situation? Polarization is driving this behavior and polarization begets polarization. If you see that as the underlying issue there's little to be sanguine about.

Also, what about the second-order consequences of irrationality? Let's grant HBD is true for the sake of argument. If you cannot be rational about this it'll cascade into everything: your views on schooling, diversity, the causes of poverty, how to handle the Third World, how to handle crime, interpreting history, immigration...All of these are then suspect.

I don't think this is hypothetical, I think a lot of the derangement and ludicrous (like, actually dangerous to lives and entire localities) policy and absurd expert advice we're seeing across a huge number of fronts is due to exactly this sort of cascade of irrationality.

I'm not smart enough to tell when something is just a harmless little carveout from rationality. I'm not smart enough to know some of the consequences of these beliefs in the moment (many of the current irrationalities du jour like gender ideology were uncritically supported by my past self). I imagine many people aren't. Which is probably what alarms them when they can tell someone with authority is being irrational (especially in a partisan way). What about when they can't tell?

The experts in stellar mechanics are not the same experts commenting on HBD, COVID, gender, or economics.

If a working biologist tells me something about epidemiology or human biology, the person is educated in that discipline and knows what he’s talking about for the most part. If this person tells me that one cannot deduce the race of a patient from a brain scan, I would believe that he is telling the truth and knows his stuff. If Bill Nye (who’s an engineer by training) tells me the same, I don’t give it much weight because Bill Nye has no biological training. Of course, I’d ignore Dr. Faucci on UFOs, astrophysics, and mechanical engineering.

https://www.nibib.nih.gov/news-events/newsroom/study-finds-artificial-intelligence-can-determine-race-medical-images#

In a recent study, published in Lancet Digital Health, NIH-funded researchers found that AI models could accurately predict self-reported race in several different types of radiographic images—a task not possible for human experts. These findings suggest that race information could be unknowingly incorporated into image analysis models, which could potentially exacerbate racial disparities in the medical setting.

For their study, Gichoya and colleagues first wanted to determine if they could develop AI models that could detect race solely from chest x-rays. They used three large datasets that spanned a diverse patient population and found that their models could predict race with high accuracy—a striking finding, as human experts are unable to make such predictions by looking at x-rays. The researchers also found that the AI could determine self-reported race even when the images were highly degraded or cropped to one ninth of the original size, or when the resolution was modified to such an extent that the images were barely recognized as x-rays. The research team subsequently used other non-chest x-ray datasets including mammograms, cervical spine radiographs, and chest computed tomography (CT) scans, and found that the AI could still determine self-reported race, regardless of the type of scan or anatomic location.

I see no mention of anything to do with imaging the brain, but I wouldn't be surprised if it could be done, and would give it more than even odds. That would be less perplexing than being able to do it from mammograms, which are ghostly images of someone's tits, and that's well beyond my ability or any radiologist I know.

If a working biologist tells me something about epidemiology or human biology, the person is educated in that discipline and knows what he’s talking about for the most part. If this person tells me that one cannot deduce the race of a patient from a brain scan, I would believe that he is telling the truth and knows his stuff.

I can get the general principle but this is absolutely the last place that I would trust a working biologist. A working biologist that told you that it is possible to deduce the race of a patient from a brain scan would be a fired biologist in extremely short order - she's going to tell me what she needs to tell me in order to remain employed and able to talk to her friends and community. That claim may or may not be true, but the informational content of an expert telling me the socially mandated opinion/belief is zero, and I'm going to have to do my own research anyway. But more than that, I can't even pretend to respect a scientist who has to lie like this. Maybe I just have oppositional defiant disorder, but the idea of taking an expert seriously when I can just prove that they're knowingly lying about extremely important topics just galls me. What's the point in even talking with them if all I can possibly get is either them fired or a brand new prevarication?

If I had told you ahead of time that we can't trust the experts on an upcoming pandemic, would you see me as going too far?

No, because that lesson was already available from the Swine Flu pandemic. What would be less believable is just how far beyond the pale that so-called experts would go. That countries would forcibly imprison their entire populations over a spicy cough and get away with it (with their reputations intact, no less) would have seemed like bad satire in 2019.

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