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You cannot be an expert in everything, it is impossible; the domain of human knowledge and experience has grown too vast for anyone to be conversant with anythi
by jgeada 4y ago
You cannot be an expert in everything, it is impossible; the domain of human knowledge and experience has grown too vast for anyone to be conversant with anything more than a minor fraction. So, sooner or later, either you distrust everything and you become a conspiracy theorist or you rely on experts. Who you choose to trust as experts gives you a bias.
My personal observation (ie read this as anecdote, not data) is that skeptics frequently choose to select as their expert the lone dissenter in the field. My interpretation is not that the skeptics I know are truly skeptics, they're contrarians who don't trust institutional knowledge or consensus.
- asdff 4y agoChomsky writes about the expert effect in Manufacturing Consent. Basically, among credentialed experts on any given topic, you can find opinions going every which way. So bringing in an expert to bolster your point is meaningless, because they are brought in because of their preexisting opinions which as you note sometimes run against the rest of the field. Another technique is to bring in someone with contrary opinions and one with favorable opinions, and basically not give them much shot to speak or force them on the defensive for everything they say with both your expert and the moderator. Then you can say you soundly defeated that critical opinion of the topic.