Trust the science, trust the experts, trust the professionals... We've all heard some variation on this before. And when it comes to old, thoroughly explored and tested ideas, applications, phenomena, etc., it's usually pretty safe to trust the experts (most of the time).
But when it comes to the new stuff hardly anyone knows anything about, history suggests we should take a bit more time embracing the experts:
This is such a powerful meme but it's completely wrong. The Wright brothers & a century of airplane builders were engineers. Scientists first dismissed flight as impossible even after it happened, then made up a bunch of irrelevant equations to pretend to explain how it happened. https://t.co/6QYFuW0Wi4
— Saifedean.com (@saifedean) July 27, 2021
Read the whole thread. Saifedean provides example after example of the experts being quite wrong about new innovations.
And with a helpful reminder from Scott Alexander way back in February, factor in the conscious and subconscious ulterior objectives, corruption, a very complex world, and it's amazing the experts get it right at all:
When the Director of the CDC asserts an opinion, she has to optimize for two things - being right, and keeping power. If she doesn't optimize for the second, she gets replaced as CDC Director by someone who does. That means she's trying to solve a harder problem than Zvi is, and it makes sense that sometimes, despite having more resources than Zvi, she does worse at it.
The way I imagine this is that Zvi reads some papers on whether the coronavirus has airborne transmission, sees the direction they're leaning, and announces on his blog that it probably has airborne transmission.
The Director of the CDC reads those same papers. But some important Senator says that if airborne transmission is announced, important industries in his state will go bankrupt. Citizens Against Lockdowns argues that the CDC already screwed up by stressing the later-proven-not-to-exist fomite-based transmission, ignoring the needs of ordinary people in favor of a bias towards imagining hypothetical transmission mechanisms that never materialize; some sympathetic Congressman tells the director that if she makes that same mistake a second time, she's out. One of the papers saying that airborne transmission is impossible comes from Stanford, and the Director owes the dean of Stanford's epidemiology department a favor for helping gather support for one of her policies once. So the Director puts out a press release saying the evidence is not quite strong enough to say airborne transmission definitely happens, and they'll review it further.
I realize it doesn't sound like it, but I'm trying to excuse the CDC here. I'm not just saying they're corrupt. I'm saying they have to deal with the inevitable amount of corruption which it takes to be part of a democratic government, and they're handling it as well as they can under the circumstances.
With friends of democracy like Scott Alexander, who needs enemies? The lesson I got from Scott's post, was to be skeptical of expert opinions when said experts are in positions of power, when said opinions are for a large audience, and especially when you have an expert friend who disagrees with said opinion. You had me at hello, Scott.
