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The problem I have with it is that it helps to legitimize the view that an uneducated person's opinions and intuitions are more valid than expertise. In the cur
by biofox 9y ago
The problem I have with it is that it helps to legitimize the view that an uneducated person's opinions and intuitions are more valid than expertise. In the current political climate, it's dangerous to continue stoking that narrative. As the parent said, the guy was hardly an amateur, but an antivaxer/global warming denier/etc. will view it as confirmation that establishment science is corrupt.
- posterboy 9y ago"uneducated" is committing to the same fallacy that you are trying to argue against. Part of the current political climate is precisely about the lack of information, arguments etc. You might call that a concern of education, but the real problem is learning, which is a far broader problem than supervised education.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- adrianratnapala 9y ago> it's dangerous to continue stoking that narrative. What, even in cases where it is right? You are steering dangerously close to saying "We the Elite should close ranks". And that sort of thing is the fuel of the very fire that you are trying to put out. The fact is as humans we have no option but to trust our own judgement on things: either by studying them directly or by judging which experts to trust. And this article shows you can't assume experts are right just because society puts them in a particular position. In the article we told that Nick Brown, an IT guy who knew high-school level maths, who discovered that an important paper by well respected psychology prof was BS when it was presented to him at a university psych class. Why had the profession swallowed it? Apparently because their maths is so bad that they just swallowed what they were told, and (according to The Guardian) the few with qualms didn't feel anyone would be interested in hearing the contrary view.
- taneq 9y agoI don't think it's necessarily that everyone in the whole psychology profession has worse than highschool level math skills. I think it's more just that, at some level, you have to trust that your colleagues have done their work correctly. You focus on the important parts of the paper (ie. the hypothesis, the method, and the results) because there's not enough time in your life to give full scrutiny to every detail of every paper you read. So sometimes, something slips through the cracks, until it's caught.
- OrganicMSG 9y agoAt which level in the sciences are you ever supposed to trust that your colleagues have done their work correctly? That sounds more like the opposite of what you are supposed to be doing.
- lostconfused 9y agoAt the level where you cite the work of others.
- OrganicMSG 9y agoI'm reminded of the Russian proverb; "Trust, but verify". A citation does generally mean that you hold a given paper with a certain level of trust, but that isn't the same as having trusted the people who wrote it to have done their job properly. The trust in the paper could be because you trust the folk who wrote it to have gone and done their job properly, however the trust could also be from having actively gone and checked the working.
- hazeii 9y agoSimilarly, "Trust - but take care in whom."
- taneq 9y agoAt the level where it takes more than one lifetime's research to reinvent your field from ground zero, it's literally impossible to progress the field without taking something on faith. Well before that, though, it becomes impractical to re-check every single thing. And the longer-established a field is, the more you have to take on faith.
- neilwilson 9y agoThe Industrial Revolution came about because The Enlightenment required that every argument was judged on its merits.
- justasitsounds 9y agoThe problem comes from people conflating the term 'amateur' (does not pursue a paid-for career in the chosen field) with 'ignorant' or 'unskilled'.