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What I think this boils down to is our cultures unhealthy focus on authority. One of my favorite classes I took at uni was advanced English rhetoric, and the te

What I think this boils down to is our cultures unhealthy focus on authority. One of my favorite classes I took at uni was advanced English rhetoric, and the teacher explained that overall most people tend to have a handful of mechanisms with which they establish their credibility with the reader, in particular with establishment of authority. "I have my Ph.D in X, therefore I am knowledge about subject X." The problem is that I see this taken to the extreme in all kinds of arguments, to the point that I would almost rather not know anything about the author or his/her authority because it colors my judgement of the material itself. Give me your facts and data and opinions and let me evaluate them for myself without having to rest on your laurels. This also applies to government and diplomatic, and high level business actions. Currently the modus operandi seems to be that people in power say, "I've been in this industry for Y years, and have worked with P, I'm the expert and you should listen to me. Oh and all this has to be done in secret, because the public wouldn't understand it anyway." I call bullshit on that constantly. Honestly, just try it, the next time you read a published scientific paper or any material of any weight or note, keep an eye on how much time and space is wasted on people establishing their "authority".

noobiemcfoob 12y ago
The problem though is that if you eliminate the markers of credentials any field of information gets flooded with many people who don't have the requisite knowledge to be talking about said field in the first place. While you could make the argument that any investigation into this bogus research would reveal that the person is unreliable, in reality, doing such an investigation is incredibly time consuming. It's much more efficient to take a Ph.D or any other specific credential as a filter and make the general assumption that someone with that credential is more likely to be correct and have valid research. Yeah, that assumption can and has been way wrong in the past, but I would argue that the valid/invalid ratio compared against the time needed to fully investigate every bit of research any person puts out is much preferred.

noobiemcfoob 12y ago

The problem though is that if you eliminate the markers of credentials any field of information gets flooded with many people who don't have the requisite knowledge to be talking about said field in the first place. While you could make the argument that any investigation into this bogus research would reveal that the person is unreliable, in reality, doing such an investigation is incredibly time consuming. It's much more efficient to take a Ph.D or any other specific credential as a filter and make the general assumption that someone with that credential is more likely to be correct and have valid research. Yeah, that assumption can and has been way wrong in the past, but I would argue that the valid/invalid ratio compared against the time needed to fully investigate every bit of research any person puts out is much preferred.