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You make the same argument in another post, will reply once. Your examples of experts you trust are all engineers, not public health scientists. Air disasters,
by mike_hearn 3y ago
You make the same argument in another post, will reply once.
Your examples of experts you trust are all engineers, not public health scientists. Air disasters, power outages and rocket explosions are immediate, visible and concrete failures. You can't consensus your way out of a plane crash. If a plane goes down ordinary people demand serious answers and because plane travel is run by the private sector the operators are all very incentivized to cooperate with a real investigation, in order to reassure the public it won't happen again. The investigations into these failures are very deep, very real, root cause what went wrong and generate concrete changes.
Scientists aren't operating in the same environment. Many people use as a test of scientific competence "do you agree with other scientists" and nothing else, which is circular reasoning. When scientists fail there's a tendency for them to argue that oh well the situation was complex, lots of unknowns, did the best we could, consensus of experts etc. People are trained to never argue with scientists so they can do this.
Engineers don't get the same privilege. Saying "the experts decided it" is worth nothing to governments, the media or the public if your oil drilling ship just sank.