4 ms·

There’s a way around this, but it’s not fun or easy. It’s to listen to only the experts on that tiny sliver of a domain in which they are experts in. (And don’t

There’s a way around this, but it’s not fun or easy. It’s to listen to only the experts on that tiny sliver of a domain in which they are experts in. (And don’t listen to that expert when they talk about something that’s not their expertise .) This means listening to the expert on caves and not to the social media loving billionaire.

lamename 2y ago
This is the correct answer. I'd add _multiple_ experts, because even they can disagree depending on the topic, which is expected and healthy. And even then, realize that experts can be wrong, but they're much less likely to be wrong than <random skeptic>.
- ashwinne 2y ago
  That is right. Listen to multiple experts and see what is the cluster/mean of an answer they are crystallizing around. And if they all have different answers, then it means that there is no clear answer for your question (yet).
Erem 2y ago
The tough thing about this approach is that the borders of each expert’s sliver of knowledge is not known to the reader, and maybe not even to the author themselves. On top of that, individual experts still carry their own biases in their heads, and they lack any sort of editorial board to service the reader by separating knowledge from bias. It’s easy for me to cast stones but I also have no answer. The best I’ve come to is to read broadly on topics you need to truly know and compare what you find in your sources. For less important topics just accept that you are likely off the mark and have much to learn.
- jameshart 2y ago
  During the early days of the pandemic, as advice to wear masks started to propagate into the population, and laypeople started to have to develop familiarity with concepts like ‘N95’, a community of helpful experts (often nurses and doctors, people with actual qualifications and real experience) piped up to tell the world that they had been trained in the proper use of PPE, and that there were very important donning and doffing procedures that needed to be followed (not touching the outside of the mask, eg), without which ordinary untrained mask users were going to be exposed to enormous risks. If you tried to use such masks without following these procedures you might as well just rub a dead bat on your face. The thing is, though, that the PPE handling requirements which practitioners like nurses and doctors are trained in, for working in a clinical environment with patients who are highly infectious or highly vulnerable to infection, are not the same as the PPE handling requirements for walking around a supermarket during a public health emergency. Public health usage of masks was not supposed to solve the same problems as masks solve in surgery or in infectious disease care contexts. Experts are vulnerable to having highly specific knowledge about how something works in a very narrow domain, but overestimating how well that knowledge applies to even quite closely related nearby domains.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    This is an aside, but I don’t really think donning and doffing an N95 mask requires expert knowledge. It is easy to screw up if you don’t know to be careful, and the stakes are sort of high. But you can learn to do it by, like, reading the material that comes with the mask and watching a YouTube or something. Rather, I thought the anti-mask advice came before it was known that masks helped. At the time this was the prudent advice: what they don’t want is people acting like the masks will fully protect them.
dilyevsky 2y ago
How do you know if someone is an expert in something without being an expert yourself?
- danielvf 2y ago
  There's an entirely legitimate question here behind this quip. I don't think there's a magical answer, but one approach I've found is to try to be a mini expert in a tiny, tiny slice of a bigger area (usually bridging over knowledge from some adjacent area I know). This means that I can then evaluate those who talk about this tiny area, and get a good baysian guess as to there broader expertise from there.
- xanderlewis 2y ago
  It depends on the field of expertise. Some fields are such that they are hard to be expert in, but it’s trivially easy to verify expertise when observed. For example, playing tennis. It’s easy to identify a good tennis player even if you can’t play tennis at all. Another classic example is cooking. Even the most caveman-like philistine knows good food. On the other hand, for some fields, verifying expertise (or ‘mastery’) is as hard as achieving it. Academic disciplines — particularly technical ones like science — are examples. In those cases, you probably have to rely on a trusted authority to verify legitimacy. Without that, you can’t distinguish the accomplished experts from the crackpot blowhards.
  - duckmysick 2y ago
    > For example, playing tennis. It’s easy to identify a good tennis player even if you can’t play tennis at all. I'm not so sure. Identifying good talent is difficult when it comes to sports. There's an entire industry of scouts that try to find decent players ahead of the others. More so, they are tasked with finding out why a particular players is good. It's anything but trivial.
    - xanderlewis 2y ago
      I’m just demonstrating that the two categories are different, which they clearly are. Not that one is trivial and the other is impossible. Of course, if you want to do any task well it becomes nontrivial.
layer8 2y ago
Why should we listen to you, are you an expert on who to listen to? ;)
harry8 2y ago
Yep totally and I agree expertise in one field means nothing in another. But I'm also old enough to have listened to a theoretical physicist on NASA's issues including the space shuttle challenger disaster. His thoughts have become regularly cited across many domains. He most certainly was not a rocket engineer. "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." --Richard P. Feynman
- smegger001 2y ago
  As I recall in that case he did a experiment to test his theory, (he chilled a sample of material the O-ring was made of and observered the result) and proved his hypothesis. The scientific method at work. You dont need to be a expert at everything when you have the resources to do adaquite research and experimentally test theories.
madmountaingoat 2y ago
I believe you have to listen to the experts on the topic, consider their biases and motivation, contrast the varying viewpoints, compare the philosophical or scientific foundations of the arguments against your researched world view, and either reach a conclusion or leave the question unanswered. More the later.

lamename 2y ago

This is the correct answer. I'd add _multiple_ experts, because even they can disagree depending on the topic, which is expected and healthy. And even then, realize that experts can be wrong, but they're much less likely to be wrong than <random skeptic>.

ashwinne 2y ago
That is right. Listen to multiple experts and see what is the cluster/mean of an answer they are crystallizing around. And if they all have different answers, then it means that there is no clear answer for your question (yet).

Erem 2y ago

The tough thing about this approach is that the borders of each expert’s sliver of knowledge is not known to the reader, and maybe not even to the author themselves. On top of that, individual experts still carry their own biases in their heads, and they lack any sort of editorial board to service the reader by separating knowledge from bias. It’s easy for me to cast stones but I also have no answer. The best I’ve come to is to read broadly on topics you need to truly know and compare what you find in your sources. For less important topics just accept that you are likely off the mark and have much to learn.

jameshart 2y ago
During the early days of the pandemic, as advice to wear masks started to propagate into the population, and laypeople started to have to develop familiarity with concepts like ‘N95’, a community of helpful experts (often nurses and doctors, people with actual qualifications and real experience) piped up to tell the world that they had been trained in the proper use of PPE, and that there were very important donning and doffing procedures that needed to be followed (not touching the outside of the mask, eg), without which ordinary untrained mask users were going to be exposed to enormous risks. If you tried to use such masks without following these procedures you might as well just rub a dead bat on your face. The thing is, though, that the PPE handling requirements which practitioners like nurses and doctors are trained in, for working in a clinical environment with patients who are highly infectious or highly vulnerable to infection, are not the same as the PPE handling requirements for walking around a supermarket during a public health emergency. Public health usage of masks was not supposed to solve the same problems as masks solve in surgery or in infectious disease care contexts. Experts are vulnerable to having highly specific knowledge about how something works in a very narrow domain, but overestimating how well that knowledge applies to even quite closely related nearby domains.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  This is an aside, but I don’t really think donning and doffing an N95 mask requires expert knowledge. It is easy to screw up if you don’t know to be careful, and the stakes are sort of high. But you can learn to do it by, like, reading the material that comes with the mask and watching a YouTube or something. Rather, I thought the anti-mask advice came before it was known that masks helped. At the time this was the prudent advice: what they don’t want is people acting like the masks will fully protect them.

dilyevsky 2y ago

How do you know if someone is an expert in something without being an expert yourself?

danielvf 2y ago
There's an entirely legitimate question here behind this quip. I don't think there's a magical answer, but one approach I've found is to try to be a mini expert in a tiny, tiny slice of a bigger area (usually bridging over knowledge from some adjacent area I know). This means that I can then evaluate those who talk about this tiny area, and get a good baysian guess as to there broader expertise from there.
xanderlewis 2y ago
It depends on the field of expertise. Some fields are such that they are hard to be expert in, but it’s trivially easy to verify expertise when observed. For example, playing tennis. It’s easy to identify a good tennis player even if you can’t play tennis at all. Another classic example is cooking. Even the most caveman-like philistine knows good food. On the other hand, for some fields, verifying expertise (or ‘mastery’) is as hard as achieving it. Academic disciplines — particularly technical ones like science — are examples. In those cases, you probably have to rely on a trusted authority to verify legitimacy. Without that, you can’t distinguish the accomplished experts from the crackpot blowhards.
- duckmysick 2y ago
  > For example, playing tennis. It’s easy to identify a good tennis player even if you can’t play tennis at all. I'm not so sure. Identifying good talent is difficult when it comes to sports. There's an entire industry of scouts that try to find decent players ahead of the others. More so, they are tasked with finding out why a particular players is good. It's anything but trivial.
  - xanderlewis 2y ago
    I’m just demonstrating that the two categories are different, which they clearly are. Not that one is trivial and the other is impossible. Of course, if you want to do any task well it becomes nontrivial.

layer8 2y ago

Why should we listen to you, are you an expert on who to listen to? ;)

harry8 2y ago

Yep totally and I agree expertise in one field means nothing in another. But I'm also old enough to have listened to a theoretical physicist on NASA's issues including the space shuttle challenger disaster. His thoughts have become regularly cited across many domains. He most certainly was not a rocket engineer. "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." --Richard P. Feynman

smegger001 2y ago
As I recall in that case he did a experiment to test his theory, (he chilled a sample of material the O-ring was made of and observered the result) and proved his hypothesis. The scientific method at work. You dont need to be a expert at everything when you have the resources to do adaquite research and experimentally test theories.

madmountaingoat 2y ago

I believe you have to listen to the experts on the topic, consider their biases and motivation, contrast the varying viewpoints, compare the philosophical or scientific foundations of the arguments against your researched world view, and either reach a conclusion or leave the question unanswered. More the later.