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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.
How can it go way too far without any baseline-standard of how much distrust is appropriate?
You've not contested charges that various experts have lied, and lied for reasons of political and person self-interest. You've not countered the implications of the replication crisis which undermines the veracity of so much published research and the institutions behind it. You've only added examples of unreliability and bias undercutting grounds of deferrence, because if subject matter experts can't be rational in their chosen fields or are utterly unreliable in areas outside of them or compromised by ideology... it seems really, really significant that the dominant expert institutions have been heavily captured by ideological interests who select for ideological affiliation.
In other words, you've only provided more reasons to distrust Experts by default, factors that only further justify a starting position of distrust until veracity can be verified, without providing any standard of how much distrust is warranted as a starting point.
If there's no standard of 'this far is okay,' you lack the same standard to compare and say 'this much distrust goes way too far.'
I think I’m pretty typical here. If a subject-matter expert tells me some fact is true, I give that a 75% confidence. Unless there’s reason to lower that expectation, it’s generally good enough for most everyday purposes. If I have reason to believe that there’s bias or compromise in the assessment (say because of money or ideological need for something to be true) then you start discounting that number. If they’re making claims tangential to their subject, it’s also a fairly substantial discount. If the confidence gets to 50 or below, it’s not information I would use to make a decision.
That is an impressively coherent standard, at least compared to what I'm used to hearing. Kudos!
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