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0 pointsjaredklewis5y ago0 comments

> When people believe the Earth is round only because that's what they were told, it's not that hard for a clever talker to convince them the Earth could be flat. When people know the Earth is round because they actually understand the physics behind it, there's no way you're ever going to convince them the Earth is flat.

The problem with understanding things from their fundamentals is that it doesn't scale. The world is too complex.

Are vaccines safe? Maybe I'll just should read through the Institute of Medicine's definitive, 900 page "Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality."

Can these robust explanations be simplified for lay people? Yes, but faced with competing, simplified explanations, can lay people dependably evaluate which is correct? Can they do it better than a domain expert?

I have some understanding of how vaccines work, from school and popular science literature. But if tomorrow leaders in the field of medicine broadly announced that all of our understanding of vaccines up until now had been mistaken and that there was now some new explanation, well I would accept that new explanation. Whatever education I have had on the topic, it is obviously not going to be better than the education of experts in the medical field.

Epistemic humility and a consequent reliance on domain experts is an essential part of being informed in our wonderfully complex world. This also means it is possible to be mislead by experts who are in the wrong, but I don't really see how this can be entirely avoided.

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waterhouse5y ago

So you have to get good at evaluating experts. Strategies include: comparing multiple sources, checking on the background of the alleged experts, picking out a few interesting but verifiable statements from their argument and fact-checking those, finding an opposing argument and seeing which argument seems to make more sense or be better supported.

Having attended school through tenth grade... There were maybe a couple of assignments over the years in which we were told to choose a topic, do research on it while following some of the above (explicitly stated) strategies, and write it all up.

The rest of the time, though, it was a lot more like "this stuff is fact" and you're not really encouraged to doubt it or look closely into the evidence chain. Evidence or proof might be presented (textbooks often mention it), or might not. I wouldn't say that the whole "skeptically evaluating your chosen experts" thing was considered a core skill or habit to cultivate (probably a few teachers considered it such, but their curricula didn't really emphasize it).

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waterhouse5y ago

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