> The only people who I would trust are named specialists in this field, that are willing to stake bits of their reputation on what they say. That is basically

> The only people who I would trust are named specialists in this field, that are willing to stake bits of their reputation on what they say. That is basically the antithesis of the enlightenment and the whole idea of the scientific method. You should not trust experts because they say so, you should trust because they are able to present evidence which is persuasive and reproducible. Even experts are wrong, and the history of the N95 mask illustrates this in the case of a relatively unknown Wu Lien-teh being correct over the objections of the prominent French Mesny. In less contemporaneous things, it took a long time in North America for gluten to be recognized as the cause of Celiac's disease because too many people there trusted the expertise of Sydney Haas who asserted that eating bananas would cure the disease. I trust evidence and citations to evidence. Experts are generally willing and capable of providing those easily and so experts generally quickly earn my trust. Assertions based instead only on claimed or even actual expertise do not earn my trust and often arouse my suspicion.