Epidemiologist here: this is so incredibly common in public health. Every healthcare professional, colleague, family member, and friend is now an expert post-pandemic. 🙄

Which makes even more sense if you understand mindreading as a linguistic byproduct of mindshaping practices.

Epistemic humility is a thing of the past

Just a reminder reddit; Technocracy is explicitly anti-democratic

I’ll check it out, thanks!

No one recommends that people only listen to experts. Experts make mistakes and also can be guilty of epistemic trespassing, all of which should make you skeptical about fully entrusting experts always. Healthy skepticism is advisable.

What fucking world do you live in that even if we removed the court context here and just compared what someone would be more likely to listen to, an expert in one field talking about another, or a high school student.... And you're trying to say you'd be similarly impacted by the high schooler?

Do you even realize what you're saying?

Some weird vacuum you have created and it doesn't even work contained like that either... Genuinely flabbergasted, like how do you process this and then share it

LOL! Yup

i want to say though, I would much more trust a pediatricians opinion over a construction workers on statistics, simply because of their general reasoning skills— I see how they can be wrong, but I think they would also be right more than the average person. I get why you wouldn’t want to use this in court— but in everyday life it might be best to take someone who is at least an expert in something with reasoning and logic to find the truth.

The damage done to a novices understanding is exponentially inhibited every time an expert commits Epistemic Trespassing. Thus the novice is left at sea with a false map and left for dead.

It can be a fine line. As I commented in another spot you have to gauge how far you’re pushing into another field. What I don’t like about the article is that it appears to put too much responsibility of the expert to stay in their lane so they do not accidentally lead people astray. Rather, I would put more responsibility on the layperson to question the methodology of a conclusion by the person making the claim.

When you’re debunking something, if your methodology is trust me, I’m a biochemist, that’s not good enough. It appears that is not what you do. It appears you try to understand things to the best of your ability, and your expertise may help you understand things a bit better that are outside of your expertise. I find it very obnoxious when someone will dismiss me because I’m not an expert, even though I have consumed a hefty amount of information on the topic.

One of my favorite examples of why you should analyze the claim and not the person, is the Wright brothers. In particular Wilbur Wright. No training in math, engineering, or physics. Never went to college. At that time, a betting man would have put their money on Samuel Langley, the scientist, the expert, and the Wrights beat him at a fraction of the cost. Langley became too focused on a problem that Wilbur saw was not a problem, and Wilbur was correct and focused on the correct problem that was keeping planes from flying.

At least your engaging. Finally. I do however find myself thoroughly unconvinced by your, and Chomsky's, claim by extension that Franco was 'doing an Anarchy' so to speak when he overthrew the Spanish Republic.

The Deuteronomy example and Texas jail example were just to highlight approaches to punishment. They are actually from a book called "The Puzzle of Ethics" by Peter Vardy and Paul Grosch. I am sorry I should have made that clear. It is a very open-ended book and doesn't lay out one philosophy. It does have religious overtones but I am not reading it for that purpose. It is just an overview of ethics so has everything from Kant, Mill, Plato to modern 19th century feminist philosophy as well as modern DNA theories. Anyway below are some of my personal views on the effectiveness or non-effectiveness of cultivating ethics.

Any change in a person is internal but there are moments when something external may bring about that change. A good example are people who have had near death illnesses or experiences whose previous behaviour can change literally to the opposite of what it was. Young soldiers who killed in a conflict may experience profound regret at their actions because of the birth of their child or the death of a parent.

Humans develop as they age and wisdom is just a word that describes the ethical changes a person undergoes as they age. If society is responsible for education then the State obviously finds it easier to inculcate young people into conforming to the State's political agenda which may or may not be ethical. As you age you develop a deeper understanding. Personally I am always suspicious of people who do not change and I describe this as "blocking". The people I have met who are blocked from changing are normally blocked by someone or something (usually parental rubbish) and I cannot strictly class them as agents with free-will.

Normally I delete my posts with zero votes or negative downvotes on the assumption that I have digressed from the original topic or I have made an error in my comment. This time I will leave the original comment and this reply.

So to keep on topic. Ethics is a lifetime study but not everyone will be able to follow a lifetime educational program due to "blocking". So ethics for all university graduates regardless of the course they choose would be desirable. Of course there are thousands of "blocked" university students but I would not want to be treated by a "blocked" doctor. I wonder how many operations have been deliberately bodged by a doctor who thinks he or she has the ethical right to do that to their patient because they may disagree with their patient's personal life, occupation or their behaviour while in hospital. It may be as simple as the doctor has heard a rumour that their patient is a paedophile when their patient is not a paedophile and the patient is completely unaware of the rumour and therefore is not in a position to defend themselves.

The problem with conformity is that it is too easy to persuade others of a load of rubbish. The problem of thinking that you do not need ethical training is that you don't develop the ethical tools to weigh the evidence if there is any evidence in the first place.

I agree with you that it is hard to change the ethical position of someone else but it is possible. Though it can only be the person themselves who makes the change. However you can try to guide others but as I said earlier some people have been blocked at a very early age. If being blocked helps them to navigate life then there is very little you can do. The point I made about doctors is very real and the ethical training they receive does not lessen the fact that they are just human beings with flaws.

cough cough Neil deGrasse Tyson

I agree that it seems overly binary. I'm a biochemist who spends a lot of time debunking anti-scientitic rubbish like anti-climate change stuff, or anti vaccination rhetoric. I try my best to stay in my lane but it's difficult to gauge what counts.

My background means that I can speak more authoritatively on vaccines than on climate change, but also knowing about the development of mRNA vaccines in recent years doesn't help to dispel misinformation. Sometimes knowing more complicates things more. The challenge often is in simplifying something so that someone who isn't a scientist can follow it, and that takes a different set of skills than the biochemistry itself.

A lot of what I do is deferring to people who are experts, but that's still wielding a sort of authority over people, because it often involves TL;DRing scientific literature that they don't have the skills or experience to read, but otherwise how do I explain why they should listen to these guys as opposed to the kinds of people at sites like naturalhealthyliving dot com

>Well done you. The rest of humanity wakes up and reassembles themselves and the world as we know it almost the same way every morning.

If it's "almost the same" then by definition you are different every morning too.

The example is given that the jury trusted the pediatrician for statistics but wouldnt for engineering.

I think that sometimes people have a hard time even identifying which concerns fall into which disciplines in the first place.

The article states that pediatricians are novices at statistics, and frankly this surprised me. I did not know that a medical degree involves little knowledge of statistics. I would expect that a doctor should understand the principle of independence since it affects diagnosis.

My issue with this is somewhat akin to your points: being knowledgable is not the same as being intelligent, deductive, thoughtful, etc. There are plenty of SME’s who are just knowledgable. This is where the knowledge only carries itself and doesn’t lead to discourse that can be resolving or productive

Well done you. The rest of humanity wakes up and reassembles themselves and the world as we know it almost the same way every morning.

I was just thinking this as I noticed the current top post in /r/science.

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/zslhqp/men_may_not_perceive_domestic_tasks_as_needing/

Expertise is not binary. Experts often have false beliefs within their areas of expertise. And it takes expertise to determine if another person is in fact an expert.

Trespassing implies a “title” to knowledge, a right to the exclusive dominion and control. Thinking of knowledge as a titled asset, like real property, implies there is only one way to gain knowledge, via some chain of custody. This is the same logic behind the gate keeping and credentialism that is responsible for so much economic injustice. And the epistemic errors are similar. It’s a shortcut, sure, but to where?

Telling people to only listen to the “real experts”, is not good advice. It’s much better to promote rigor, logic, skepticism and parsimony as a reliable path to knowledge.

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God I thought that said Epstein trespassing

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Isn't this what Thomas Sowell was going at Noam Chomsky for?

Metacognition - being prepared to admit you are wrong or in other ways deficient - is an important part of the path to wisdom. It seems easy to know when others are wrong, but it's much more important to see your own mistakes. Don't judge me by my successes, judge me by how I handle my failures. To be able to see yourself as others see you would indeed be a great gift.