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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 wanted to reply to this, but I realise I'd essentially just be regurgitating Scott's 2017 post "Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning"*, so I'm just going to link it and summarize its thesis below.
It's no good saying "experts are reliable, aside from one or two blind spots". This isn't true from a reputational perspective, for the same reason that noticing a small factual error (no matter how minor or inconsequential) in a news article inevitably undermines the reader's confidence in the quality of the rest of the article: "if they got this wrong, what else did they get wrong?" But it's also no good for the simple fact that knowledge is holistic, not atomised. It's not like the facts and theories governing HBD are siloed in a separate warehouse from every other topic: they are inextricably intertwined with facts and theories in evolutionary biology, psychology, the social sciences, education, criminology etc. You might think that "the earth was created 6,000 years ago" is just a belief which can sit comfortably in your matrix of beliefs without affecting anything else, but before long you'll find yourself arguing that dinosaur skeletons were planted there by Satan or the speed of light changed over time.
So no, you can't just say to people "everything in these warehouses is 100% a-ok, but caveat emptor for those two warehouses labelled 'HBD' and 'Covid'." There's only one big warehouse and everything is touching everything else without so much as a sheet of clingfilm to prevent cross-contamination.
*Reading it six years later makes me sad: it almost scans as a preemptive apology for Scott's subsequent retreat into self-imposed intellectual incuriosity and cowardice, when his fearless willingness to step on whatever toes he pleased is what made his name in the first place.
A central question is who counts as an expert and in what context.
To most people, I think the answer is implicitly something like "any professor, reporter, or politician on twitter".
My lived definition is closer to "meta-analyses, literature reviews, textbooks, and institutionally backed datasets".
If your lived experience is mostly on buzz-based social media, I can see why you'd distrust experts. If it's based on peer-reviewed literature reviews, not so much.
For example, re HBD, surveys show that intelligence researchers largely agree genes are a likely cause of intelligence differences. Sure, "twitter experts" might express extreme confidence that it is not and that you are racist if you think so, but... who counts as an expert to you? Why do you define expert in that way?
I think many people on this forum weigh expertness by power - i.e Fauci is The Expert on Covid. I don't. Neither perspective is wrong. The people weighing with power care about political consequences. I care about understanding the truth of matters. Different goals/values.
You are correct that neither perspective is wrong. But it seems outrageously myopic and self absorbed to conclude that the people focused on "Twitter experts" (which include everyone from the media up to the Chief medical advisor to the President) care more about political consequences than the truth.
The people you refer to as experts are not the experts presented to the public, while the people presented to the public as experts shape public policy, so yes, we do care about political consequences and the wielding of power. This is the culture war thread after all. But the reason we are flipping out is because the twitter experts are the ones with actual power over society, and they are lying their asses off 90% of the time, and trying to hide their ignorance the other 10%. It is precisely the truth that we care about.
What's more, you have developed a definition of expert which renders everything you say inscrutable (at best) to everyone else, which is generally only good for sticking your head in the sand, not for engaging in thoughtful conversations.
Let me be clearer. I care far more about ensuring I believe the truth than I do about whether society believes the truth. I didn't mean to imply the "power" perspective was bad/wrong/useless.
I care about having accurate beliefs about specific things (e.g. HBD, causal effect of college attendance on income, etc). Because of this perspective, I don't really care if Experts™ are biased. I do care if specific "experts" are biased or have poor epistemological hygiene - though, even there, I care more about whether particular papers are biased.
I don't think this is "sticking [my] head in the sand" - I think it's focusing my "thoughtful conversation" energy elsewhere.
Yeah I'm sorry, saying you are sticking your head in the sand was dumb - you're here after all, and you engage as much as you can from what I've seen. It totally fucked up the point of that paragraph too, because what I was really driving at was that it negatively impacts your ability to have conversations here about the culture war, because people either won't understand you or will think you are behaving maliciously.
That's a good point that I'll need to ponder more.
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