6 ms·

This is my pet peeve topic because this alleged need for "trust" has become so ubiquitous. It's like a meme that is parroted blindly. At a closer look, it's in

This is my pet peeve topic because this alleged need for "trust" has become so ubiquitous. It's like a meme that is parroted blindly. At a closer look, it's in my opinion not so clear whether trust should play any substantial role in dealing with potential knowledge and insight, especially since the term "expert" is interpreted ranging from "a guy who wrote an M.A. thesis about some related topic" to "internationally renowned researcher with 100+ publications in a specific, narrow subtopic of a field who is highly estimated by their peers and has served in various panels to inform decision makers." Generally, science is not built on trusting others, it's built on being skeptical. What people miss is not trust in alleged or real experts, what they lack is intellectual humility and the ability to determine when someone else likely knows more about a topic than you. That doesn't mean that they have to trust that person's opinion about the matter, it just means that they should have a tendency to believe that person's informed opinions more easily than their own uninformed preconceptions. For example, people shouldn't trust authorities and the experts these rely on. It's perfectly fine if they constantly scrutinize these authorities. However, they should be able to recognize when they clearly know less then these and act accordingly. Whether that means remaining agnostic or acting upon the expert's knowledge (even if it is taken with a pinch of salt) depends on the decision situation, how much need for action there is. By the same token, you should also not trust text books. You should be aware of your own limitations while trying to check the information in the book. When you know you don't have enough knowledge to check it, you're going to have to trust some of the content. The more you build up knowledge, the more you can check the book, and at some point you will find errors in it.

sorcerer-mar 1y ago
This is why COVID was the breaking point: it was one of the very rare scenarios where highly technical and shifting scientific understanding was directly attached to meaningful lifestyle impacts for people. Science is always at least as messy (generally more so) as it was during COVID, but generally it doesn't matter because only "settled science" gets turned into technology and deployed to people's lives. All the input chaos has been abstracted away by the time it matters at all to most people. The general public is not, has never been, and never will be cognitively and intellectually equipped to grapple with shifting science directly -- nor should they need to, they've got other shit to do that scientists can't do!
dinfinity 1y ago
> Generally, science is not built on trusting others, it's built on being skeptical. It is actually built on probability. That is the most important thing missing from a lot of discourse, imho. Modeling reality is a lot of "this is very probably true/false" rather than "this is true/false", but everyday communication is almost exclusively in the latter form. Authority/expert status is just a heuristic used to guess the probability of what is presented by that authority, but proper communication about what is presented should include indications of that probability. This is however so uncommon that almost everybody thinks of ideas in a binary way, leading to distrust, tribalism and antagonism. Compare "eggs are bad for you" with "eggs are probably bad for you". If a year later the same authority states the opposite trust disappears rapidly if it was stated as absolutely as in the former case. A lot of overly confident communication by authorities in the Covid-19 days in an effort to improve compliance caused massive distrust, I'm sure. Something to try in your own life is to include probabilities when you state something. How sure are you of what you're saying? Having to think about this quickly leads to the intellectual humility you mention. It also antagonizes people less, because you're inevitably going to leave more room for opposing views.

sorcerer-mar 1y ago

This is why COVID was the breaking point: it was one of the very rare scenarios where highly technical and shifting scientific understanding was directly attached to meaningful lifestyle impacts for people. Science is always at least as messy (generally more so) as it was during COVID, but generally it doesn't matter because only "settled science" gets turned into technology and deployed to people's lives. All the input chaos has been abstracted away by the time it matters at all to most people. The general public is not, has never been, and never will be cognitively and intellectually equipped to grapple with shifting science directly -- nor should they need to, they've got other shit to do that scientists can't do!

dinfinity 1y ago

> Generally, science is not built on trusting others, it's built on being skeptical. It is actually built on probability. That is the most important thing missing from a lot of discourse, imho. Modeling reality is a lot of "this is very probably true/false" rather than "this is true/false", but everyday communication is almost exclusively in the latter form. Authority/expert status is just a heuristic used to guess the probability of what is presented by that authority, but proper communication about what is presented should include indications of that probability. This is however so uncommon that almost everybody thinks of ideas in a binary way, leading to distrust, tribalism and antagonism. Compare "eggs are bad for you" with "eggs are probably bad for you". If a year later the same authority states the opposite trust disappears rapidly if it was stated as absolutely as in the former case. A lot of overly confident communication by authorities in the Covid-19 days in an effort to improve compliance caused massive distrust, I'm sure. Something to try in your own life is to include probabilities when you state something. How sure are you of what you're saying? Having to think about this quickly leads to the intellectual humility you mention. It also antagonizes people less, because you're inevitably going to leave more room for opposing views.