8 ms·

>I'd say that believing experts is more an act of philosophy than an act of science. Not philosophy. Faith.

by ysavir 6y ago

wwright 6y ago
Have you read about the Munchausen Trilemma? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  I’ve always found that very boring since it seems obvious to me that logical truths require the axiomatic argument, scientific truths require the regressive argument, and reductionism doesn’t allow for complex supernatural claims to transcend from merely needing axiomatic support to affecting scientific truths. It feels like one of those things in philosophy that religious people greatly exaggerate the importance of.
  - ukj 6y ago
    Well, no - it's the foundational problem of knowledge/epistemology. How you choose to "solve" it is up to you. The solution computer scientists like a lot is coherentism. You pull yourself up by the bootstraps - like we do with self-hosting compilers. Of course, it's just a conceptual game (like all philosophy). The idea of "prove to me that you know..." seems a bit like "Jump for me... Higher!"
  - SuoDuanDao 6y ago
    >It feels like one of those things in philosophy that religious people greatly exaggerate the importance of. Appropriately named then!
  - wwright 6y ago
    I agree that in the modern world, many people may find it somewhat "obvious" (or rather, they have a similar belief intuitively), but I think it's very relevant here: of course doubting science requires some kind of faith. So does believing science. Everything requires faith, we can't actually know anything without faith in something. (I personally am very aggressively areligious, so "faith" here does not necessarily refer to a spiritual faith.)
    - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
      I think the difficulty with making an equivalence between “faith” and this type of fundamental epistemic limitation is that no matter how well-intentioned you are, religious people are going to take the soundbyte and claim it’s “proof that science can’t explain everything” which will then be “proof that god is possible” which will then mean oppressing people whose beliefs they don’t like. We need a much different concept than faith. Faith means continuing to believe something that is massively contrary to the evidence, to preserve some type of fidelity or loyalty to a previous belief commitment. I think this is massively different than acknowledging the fundamental deductive limitations of reasoning about epistemic metatruths.
      - learc83 6y ago
        >Faith means continuing to believe something that is massively contrary to the evidence, to preserve some type of fidelity or loyalty to a previous belief commitment. You've just defined faith in a way that wins your argument, but that is not any kind of consensus definition of faith.
        mlthoughts2018 6y ago
        I don’t agree. I’m saying there exists a difference of kind between the act of belief in inferential integrity of experts despite fundamental epistemic limitations of philosophy, and the separate act of continuing to believe something contrary to the evidence. The ubiquitous notion of religious faith is similar to the second thing, and is not similar to the first thing. It’s not a matter of consensus or definition.
bluGill 6y ago
Whatever, I don't have time to become an expert in everything, much less the desire. I choose to focus on my small area (which has changed over time, both because my interests change and because my next job needs me to learn something) and trust the rest.
- zzzcpan 6y ago
  But isn't this part of the point? Philosophically science is about being interested and studying broad range of topics and areas to judge everything for yourself and make your own conclusions, not trust expert opinions. In my experience, whenever I have to rely on an expert opinion I usually feel bad later when I acquire more knowledge in the area myself, as those opinions are almost always wrong.
  - swsieber 6y ago
    How are you informed about the experts' opinions. If it's via the news, then what your are getting is almost surely warped.
  - MaybiusStrip 6y ago
    This statement doesn't even make sense, where are you acquiring this knowledge if not from experts? Are you out there doing field research and conducting your own scientific experiments on every subject you're interested in? I'd love to hear a couple examples of which "expert opinions" you've disproven for yourself and where you acquired the supporting evidence.
    - zzzcpan 6y ago
      You are confusing opinions with evidence and facts. Obviously you acquire knowledge by reading papers where people are doing research and experiments and presenting evidence, analytics and all the facts from which you can make your own conclusions.
      - MaybiusStrip 6y ago
dtech 6y ago
Faith implies there is no mathematically sound reasoning underlying the belief, at least a little The hypothesis "Expert consensus is more likely to be correct" is falsifiable and thus not purely blind faith
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  Unfortunately, the recent reproducibility crisis amongst expert ‘scientists’ has damaged this hypothesis greatly.
- learc83 6y ago
  >Expert consensus is more likely to be correct" is falsifiable That's one of those things that sounds like it should be falsifiable, but in practice it's not. The statement is far too broad to conduct reasonable experiments, and if you narrow the scope to the point where you can conduct experiments, then your experiments won't support a conclusion that's broad enough to be a sound foundation for "expert consensus is more likely to be correct". I happen to think expert consensus is generally useful, but there's still an element of faith in my opinion.
  - ballenf 6y ago
    To put a finer point the phrase "expert consensus" is circular itself as we tend to take away the "expert" label from anyone whose position diverges too far from the consensus.
  - dtech 6y ago
    Of course it's not 100% black and wide and there is an element of faith. The consolidated statement is way to wide, but if you take consensus to mean "a large majority like 66%+ portion of the scientific literature within the field(s) relevant to that specific instance" that becomes a lot more testable for an individual issue.
    - learc83 6y ago
      > there is an element of faith That's exactly my point. >if you take consensus to mean "a large majority like 66%+ portion of the scientific literature within the field(s) relevant to that specific instance" that becomes a lot more testable for an individual issue. Yeah we can say that for some specific issue like choosing what time of year to plant tomatoes, expert consensus is useful, but that doesn't generalize, which was also my point.
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
Belief in experts is itself sound scientific reasoning about the available evidence on experts. It’s like a chain of custody in legal evidence. If someone presents evidence in court and states that there are logs, seals and timestamps proving the chain of custody and disproving tampering, it is not “an act of faith” to believe the evidence was preserved accurately, even though you only observe details about the chain of custody, not the state of the evidence itself at all times. It’s similar with expert opinion. You can think of the evidence (which you don’t personally observe) as passing through a series of chain of custody transactions - initial data collection, data preparation, actual study or research, proposed models, fact checking and testing correctness, presentation of results, use in an application / prototype / clinical trial, etc. Believing in the fidelity of this chain of events is itself amenable to scientific and inductive inquiry. Just like some rare case where police or attorneys lied about chain of custody with evidence that did get tampered with, sometimes this model of continuing trust at each step of the chain is wrong. Sometimes the chain of events that led to an expert opinion is untrustworthy - someone falsified data or lied, or there was an undetected error. But that means it is a statistical process with an error rate, not that it contains any aspect similar to faith.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  It seems to me that "belief in experts" or not is kind of analogous to the longstanding conflict in Western culture between Catholicism vs. Protestantism. I mean, philosophically, both sides have good points about fundamental flaws of the other.
buu700 6y ago
The difference between belief and faith is that belief may be substantiated by evidence and can change with new evidence. I believe that kangaroos are real. If there were suddenly overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I would say okay and start believing that they probably aren't real, not stay firm in the original belief and dismiss the new evidence as a test of my faith.

>I'd say that believing experts is more an act of philosophy than an act of science. Not philosophy. Faith.

by ysavir 6y ago

>I'd say that believing experts is more an act of philosophy than an act of science. Not philosophy. Faith.

Have you read about the Munchausen Trilemma? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
I’ve always found that very boring since it seems obvious to me that logical truths require the axiomatic argument, scientific truths require the regressive argument, and reductionism doesn’t allow for complex supernatural claims to transcend from merely needing axiomatic support to affecting scientific truths. It feels like one of those things in philosophy that religious people greatly exaggerate the importance of.
- ukj 6y ago
  Well, no - it's the foundational problem of knowledge/epistemology. How you choose to "solve" it is up to you. The solution computer scientists like a lot is coherentism. You pull yourself up by the bootstraps - like we do with self-hosting compilers. Of course, it's just a conceptual game (like all philosophy). The idea of "prove to me that you know..." seems a bit like "Jump for me... Higher!"
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  >It feels like one of those things in philosophy that religious people greatly exaggerate the importance of. Appropriately named then!
- wwright 6y ago
  I agree that in the modern world, many people may find it somewhat "obvious" (or rather, they have a similar belief intuitively), but I think it's very relevant here: of course doubting science requires some kind of faith. So does believing science. Everything requires faith, we can't actually know anything without faith in something. (I personally am very aggressively areligious, so "faith" here does not necessarily refer to a spiritual faith.)
  - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    I think the difficulty with making an equivalence between “faith” and this type of fundamental epistemic limitation is that no matter how well-intentioned you are, religious people are going to take the soundbyte and claim it’s “proof that science can’t explain everything” which will then be “proof that god is possible” which will then mean oppressing people whose beliefs they don’t like. We need a much different concept than faith. Faith means continuing to believe something that is massively contrary to the evidence, to preserve some type of fidelity or loyalty to a previous belief commitment. I think this is massively different than acknowledging the fundamental deductive limitations of reasoning about epistemic metatruths.
    - learc83 6y ago
      >Faith means continuing to believe something that is massively contrary to the evidence, to preserve some type of fidelity or loyalty to a previous belief commitment. You've just defined faith in a way that wins your argument, but that is not any kind of consensus definition of faith.
      - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
        I don’t agree. I’m saying there exists a difference of kind between the act of belief in inferential integrity of experts despite fundamental epistemic limitations of philosophy, and the separate act of continuing to believe something contrary to the evidence. The ubiquitous notion of religious faith is similar to the second thing, and is not similar to the first thing. It’s not a matter of consensus or definition.

bluGill 6y ago

Whatever, I don't have time to become an expert in everything, much less the desire. I choose to focus on my small area (which has changed over time, both because my interests change and because my next job needs me to learn something) and trust the rest.

zzzcpan 6y ago
But isn't this part of the point? Philosophically science is about being interested and studying broad range of topics and areas to judge everything for yourself and make your own conclusions, not trust expert opinions. In my experience, whenever I have to rely on an expert opinion I usually feel bad later when I acquire more knowledge in the area myself, as those opinions are almost always wrong.
- swsieber 6y ago
  How are you informed about the experts' opinions. If it's via the news, then what your are getting is almost surely warped.
- MaybiusStrip 6y ago
  This statement doesn't even make sense, where are you acquiring this knowledge if not from experts? Are you out there doing field research and conducting your own scientific experiments on every subject you're interested in? I'd love to hear a couple examples of which "expert opinions" you've disproven for yourself and where you acquired the supporting evidence.
  - zzzcpan 6y ago
    You are confusing opinions with evidence and facts. Obviously you acquire knowledge by reading papers where people are doing research and experiments and presenting evidence, analytics and all the facts from which you can make your own conclusions.
    - MaybiusStrip 6y ago

dtech 6y ago

Faith implies there is no mathematically sound reasoning underlying the belief, at least a little The hypothesis "Expert consensus is more likely to be correct" is falsifiable and thus not purely blind faith

mensetmanusman 6y ago
Unfortunately, the recent reproducibility crisis amongst expert ‘scientists’ has damaged this hypothesis greatly.
learc83 6y ago
>Expert consensus is more likely to be correct" is falsifiable That's one of those things that sounds like it should be falsifiable, but in practice it's not. The statement is far too broad to conduct reasonable experiments, and if you narrow the scope to the point where you can conduct experiments, then your experiments won't support a conclusion that's broad enough to be a sound foundation for "expert consensus is more likely to be correct". I happen to think expert consensus is generally useful, but there's still an element of faith in my opinion.
- ballenf 6y ago
  To put a finer point the phrase "expert consensus" is circular itself as we tend to take away the "expert" label from anyone whose position diverges too far from the consensus.
- dtech 6y ago
  Of course it's not 100% black and wide and there is an element of faith. The consolidated statement is way to wide, but if you take consensus to mean "a large majority like 66%+ portion of the scientific literature within the field(s) relevant to that specific instance" that becomes a lot more testable for an individual issue.
  - learc83 6y ago
    > there is an element of faith That's exactly my point. >if you take consensus to mean "a large majority like 66%+ portion of the scientific literature within the field(s) relevant to that specific instance" that becomes a lot more testable for an individual issue. Yeah we can say that for some specific issue like choosing what time of year to plant tomatoes, expert consensus is useful, but that doesn't generalize, which was also my point.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

Belief in experts is itself sound scientific reasoning about the available evidence on experts. It’s like a chain of custody in legal evidence. If someone presents evidence in court and states that there are logs, seals and timestamps proving the chain of custody and disproving tampering, it is not “an act of faith” to believe the evidence was preserved accurately, even though you only observe details about the chain of custody, not the state of the evidence itself at all times. It’s similar with expert opinion. You can think of the evidence (which you don’t personally observe) as passing through a series of chain of custody transactions - initial data collection, data preparation, actual study or research, proposed models, fact checking and testing correctness, presentation of results, use in an application / prototype / clinical trial, etc. Believing in the fidelity of this chain of events is itself amenable to scientific and inductive inquiry. Just like some rare case where police or attorneys lied about chain of custody with evidence that did get tampered with, sometimes this model of continuing trust at each step of the chain is wrong. Sometimes the chain of events that led to an expert opinion is untrustworthy - someone falsified data or lied, or there was an undetected error. But that means it is a statistical process with an error rate, not that it contains any aspect similar to faith.

perl4ever 6y ago
It seems to me that "belief in experts" or not is kind of analogous to the longstanding conflict in Western culture between Catholicism vs. Protestantism. I mean, philosophically, both sides have good points about fundamental flaws of the other.

buu700 6y ago

The difference between belief and faith is that belief may be substantiated by evidence and can change with new evidence. I believe that kangaroos are real. If there were suddenly overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I would say okay and start believing that they probably aren't real, not stay firm in the original belief and dismiss the new evidence as a test of my faith.