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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.
The experts are wrong a lot. But, for almost everyone in the general population, and for many people here, your vague guesses and anecdotal impressions are a lot worse. It takes effort, discipline, and raw intelligence to do better! It's reasonable to not trust that everything's going great just because the economy numbers are up! But you shouldn't just jump from 'my costs feel higher than a few years ago' to 'clearly experts are wrong', dig deeper!
It does, and the replication crisis shows that systemically they aren't using either.
The reason people are using personal anecdotes is they are not given access to the same data the "experts" are, so any comparison between the two is inherently disingenuous from the start.
A lot of them are using it, to great effect. The flat piece of nanoscale-patterned silicon you're using to post, the network of private businesses and public law that makes up the 'financial system' that structures your economic activity, and a thousand other omnipresent social systems have been built by hundreds of thousands of those 'experts'. And they all work pretty well, and are complicated as hell! Even when you can intuitively tell something's wrong with one of them, that does not imply they're wrong or lying specifically about the first thing that comes to mind, e.g. inflation or how productive the economy is.
I strongly disagree? I'm strongly for making more data used for research public (as in, free to download from github or wherever), but, like, there wasn't any secret data that mask or vaccine advocates were making decisions off of that we didn't have access to. And there were a small minority of experts, people at Harvard or similar, who fought the covid consensus the entire time. Do you have an example in mind here?
The silicon yes. The 'financial system', and the other social systems, not so much.
I think stock markets, commodity markets, corporate and contract law, insurance, banking, accounting, and thousands of individual facets of modern economic practice and culture are technically complicated and quite important to the functioning of the modern economy? And they're definitely built and maintained by "experts". (Some of) the field of economics, too, is quite relevant to modern business, and also has a lot of experts.
Other social systems are important too! Courts / the law, for instance, are kind of a core case of "thing maintained by experts", they're the highest authority and last resort conflict-resolvers, and the entire system only works because lawyers and especially judges being inculcated into taking the law seriously by the last generation of judges and lawyers.
The easiest way I've found to loose faith in the justice system is by talking with your so-called 'experts'(Lawyers, Law Enforcement) in their actual field experience.
I imagine it's similar in other fields, as well.
I mean, the US justice system has problems. The South African justice system also has problems. Not the same problems. Is it so informative to discuss issues or lost faith generally? The US justice system mostly works, and you can tell because you don't have to bribe police every time they pull you over and you don't have your business seized by the state when it gets too big. Collapsing all grievances into a vague sense of 'everything sux' isn't useful
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Experts do not determine who buys or sells stocks and commodities. That is the free market. Economic experts are clearly not able to predict the functioning of the market, as they constantly make utterly wrong predictions. Steve Keen has made a strong case in Debunking Economics that many of the basic models that are used, are not actually valid unless you unrealistic preconditions are true. In reality, we also see that companies do not in fact hire economists to set their prices, but use other methods, like trial and error, because that beats the experts.
It seems to me that the functioning of the financial markets is largely a matter of trial and error as well. For example, the subprime mortgage crisis involved "experts" developing the innovative idea that if you bundle low quality mortgages, they suddenly become the most reliable assets to hold. Only after people starting defaulting on their mortgages and the bundles were proven to not be triple-A quality, did the "experts" suddenly realize that the triple-A status was a delusion.
When so-called "experts" are not in fact able to predict whether their solutions works in practice, then we cannot trust their claims on that front.
I'm referring to the people who design the market mechanisms, and design the laws to adjudicate disputes within them, and (a thousand other things). Those are, obviously, experts.
Consider the chief economist at google, who they hired to design their advertising auctions, among other things. Amazon also has a chief economist. Microecon is actually a strong field with good theory and empirical work!
I think this is a really stupid dispute in general. A lot of so-called "experts" are absolutely awful, and this includes quite a few economists, most psychologists and social theorists, and so on. But a lot of experts are just smart people who exist in useful intellectual and practical traditions and contribute a lot to society. Does it even make sense to condemn both in the same way?
These were largely not designed top down by experts, and where they were designed top down by experts they quickly failed and were modified by those in the field. That's one reason the law is such a mess; the "design" layer is still there in the statutes and regulations but it's been modified by case law and custom so often that looking at that doesn't give you a real picture of how things work.
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Ah yes, because those are the people who get criticized the most when people attack "the experts". Actually this is pretty illustrative, because this is exactly the mechanism being deployed to demand trust - Look, we used calculus! Just like physicists! You trust physicists, don't you? Well, then you have to trust us!
If memory serves that's because there was no data the mask mandates was based on, and the idea that vaccines prevented transmission was an outright lie. That's worse!
Yes, the example I had in mind is the one that was debated here recently - economic statistics. We don't have access to the raw data, and we don't have access to the algorithm that produces the output. There was a similar story during COVID with a simulation used to argue for lockdowns, that no one got to see until after the lockdowns were in effect, end which ended up being a buggy clusterfuck, and even though they published the code, I think they never published the input data.
I mean, you all were criticizing the CPI (published by the BLS) and more broadly the economy, which clearly falls into the public portion of the financial system?
This a very confusing sentence. There was overwhelming data that n95 masks significantly reduced exposure to viral particles, and that cloth masks reduced exposure a bit. There was substantial data that n95 masks could prevent transmission of other viruses. There were plenty of existing studies about this, and while most of those studies didn't publish their data, the data wouldn't have helped you interpret the studies better, the flaws are in interpretation, methodology, etc, not private data. Mandating cloth masks was straightforwardly stupid. Mandating n95 masks or better masks might've worked, if rapid trials were run initially to make sure they actually reduced transmission, idk. That vaccines prevented transmission wasn't an outright lie, I believe the initial studies did show a reduction in transmission. I think people were genuinely incorrect and had poor processes for coming to the correct conclusion - which is still damnable if you're in power, because it's your duty to be correct, but it's not an outright lie. It's also arguable that transmission rates increased as the virus mutated. Also, the cochrane review that claimed masks don't prevent transmission ever was wrong, I think. https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-3486610/v1
We do have access to most of the algorithm that produces the output - the BLS publishes their methodology for the CPI with a lot of detail on their website. I think mostly the reason we don't have access to the raw data is bureaucratic slowness.
I think you're very confused about the relevance of publishing the input data to the broader issues with experts being wrong. Yes, that study was terrible. The terribleness was in the code they published and the wy they interpreted it, not the input data.
Pardon, I glossed over some of the sentence. No the financial system is absolute garbage too.
On a population wide scale? Could you give some links to it?
The proper way to do this thing is to publish all the steps necessary to reproduce the results, with input data so that anyone can actually attempt it themselves.
So we have raw data for 10 years ago, or something?
No, I'm not. Most of academia relies on trust, rather than verification. We trust researchers to not pull dishonest tricks to get their papers published (either for it's own sake because of "publish or perish", or because they're pushing an agenda), and we trust the reviewers to ask hard questions about the research. At this point it is basically proven they do neither. Publishing input data would allow external verification, but it is purposely not done.
The code is the algorithm, which I explicitly brought up as well. But input data is also important, it's literally the first thing you get asked for by any developer trying to fix a bug.
... no, individual evidence from n95 wearers tested under controlled conditions, which is why it was phrased like that.
I agree that is much better, and think it should be ~ mandatory for all publicly funded research. I just strongly disagree that this is related to why people distrust experts, or even why some subfields of experts are constantly catastrophically wrong.
Specifically, slowness in adapting to modern conditions. Publishing all your data wasn't feasible before the internet, and government and sometimes academic research norms are still stuck in the 20th century.
Materials scientists and chemists don't publish their raw data either! But those fields are, to a significant extent, more trustworthy than social science. And plenty of shoddy econ research is done on public data, but is worthless because what they do with it sucks.
You can still just fake your data? Faking your data well in experimental fields isn't actually hard.
I think it's definitely one of the factors for why they are catastrophically wrong. Another is the very act of expert-trusting, we'd have a lot less problems if there was a lot more distrust.
They don't need to, their work is constantly being verified with data from mines, foundries, factories, and refineries.
There's ways to detect that, and it will come out during replication. Experimental fields aren't such a big deal anyway, since they are, in fact experimental - the field itself tells you not to take the results very seriously.
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In fact the existing data/studies indicated that masks were ineffective and a placebo at best
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