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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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