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Notes -
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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