I remember (somewhat, details may be a bit foggy) in Richard Feynman’s biography of sorts, he tells a story about a time when he served on a committee to recommend new science books for (I think) several grade levels like 6-12. He first wryly notes that he was the only member of the committee to read all of the candidate texts from several publishers in each grade level in their entirety. He ended up recommending science books by a publisher that was not in favor with the rest of the committee, and their principal reason for liking another publisher’s books was because two-hundred engineers had participated in a review of some of the same books and their votes pointed to this other recommendation.
So the committee asks him to justify his different recommendation with an appeal to authority—“surely you are not smarter than 200 engineers!”. He says something along the lines of no I don’t claim to be smarter than the sum of 200 engineers, but thats not what you have here. I am smarter than the average of 200 engineers.
Now clearly, we can’t all be experts in everything and have to yield to expert consensus as a matter of practicality—but it should never be assumed to settle anything—apart of course from cases where its a majority of people testing hypothesis and models and finding them in agreement with observations. That has real lasting value—even if the model is later found to be flawed its usually still “good enough” for most observations (e.g. Newton’s physics).
I remember (somewhat, details may be a bit foggy) in Richard Feynman’s biography of sorts, he tells a story about a time when he served on a committee to recommend new science books for (I think) several grade levels like 6-12. He first wryly notes that he was the only member of the committee to read all of the candidate texts from several publishers in each grade level in their entirety. He ended up recommending science books by a publisher that was not in favor with the rest of the committee, and their principal reason for liking another publisher’s books was because two-hundred engineers had participated in a review of some of the same books and their votes pointed to this other recommendation.
So the committee asks him to justify his different recommendation with an appeal to authority—“surely you are not smarter than 200 engineers!”. He says something along the lines of no I don’t claim to be smarter than the sum of 200 engineers, but thats not what you have here. I am smarter than the average of 200 engineers.
Now clearly, we can’t all be experts in everything and have to yield to expert consensus as a matter of practicality—but it should never be assumed to settle anything—apart of course from cases where its a majority of people testing hypothesis and models and finding them in agreement with observations. That has real lasting value—even if the model is later found to be flawed its usually still “good enough” for most observations (e.g. Newton’s physics).