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Skepticism by the unqualified is just denial of expertise. Whatever Mr Silver's qualification on statistics, it does not render him any sort of expert on contag
by jgeada 3y ago
Skepticism by the unqualified is just denial of expertise. Whatever Mr Silver's qualification on statistics, it does not render him any sort of expert on contagious pathology nor on coronaviruses in general.
Skepticism is warranted when one has an underlying knowledge basis to interpret new statements, put them into context of the existing models and detect something amiss. Without that foundation, what being called skepticism is just an assertion of one's lack of knowledge. Dunning-Kruger effect in spades.
- mikebenfield 3y agoPeople have to make judgments about which experts in which fields to trust. Should I believe a Catholic priest (or a Muslim imam, or a Jewish rabbi) when it comes to questions about the nature of the universe? What about when it comes to questions of ethics? They are experts, after all. What about psychology? I am by no means an expert in psychology, but I'm also well aware that there is a big crisis in that field, where apparently most results can't be replicated, and there seems to be a lot of both outright data manipulation and just sheer incompetence with statistics on the part of researchers. But should I just uncritically accept results in that field? Again, I'm not an expert, so apparently I'm not allowed to be skeptical.
- avgcorrection 3y agoClearly social epistemology is something that you know nothing about and thus something that you should keep quiet about.