In a field in which you personally are not an expert, the closest you can come to the truth is to accept the opinion of the majority of the experts in the age in which you live.
The problem is that the very fact that experts are listened to and respected creates incentives to become certified as an expert or to claim to be an expert, and that these incentives are non-truth-tracking. If you lust for fame and glory, or you want to seem original, or if you have a political agenda, or if you’re worried about what your publisher thinks will sell—all these sorts of things might help your bid to be certified as an expert or hinder it, but they’re not directly about the map that reflects the territory, and everything that’s not directly about the map that reflects the territory just adds noise to the process.
In a physical science with conclusions nailed down for decades, sure, don’t even think about questioning the consensus. But on an issue people actually care about (sorry, physics nerds, but you know what I mean), if you have a concept of epistemic rationality, and you know about Aumann agreement and updating your beliefs on other people’s beliefs as a special case of updating your beliefs on any data you get from your environment and you take all of this dead seriously, and you’ve read the existing literature, and you’ve spent many, many hours thinking about it, and you still find yourself disagreeing with the consensus—I’m not going to say you should forfeit your vision. You can’t trust the mainstream, because the mainstream is insane. The fact that you’re insane too doesn’t mean you can just trust the authorities; it means you have to lower your confidence in everything.
I agree, except that a non-expert needs to have some rules by which they can distinguish fields which really do have experts (eg climate science) from those that don’t (eg theology)
Within theology, I will accept the views of theology professors (e.g. about the exact nature of the trinity) but not on the assumptions their field depends (e.g. whether God exists).
Weren’t things like the current positions on the trinity arrived by political processes, including persecution of dissenters as heretics? Why should such positions be expected to be more likely to be true, even assuming divine beings? Or do you mean you will accept their expert opinion on what the church positions are, their history and so on?
I am presuming a theology professor is more likely to have a view based on the arguments (if you can call them that) and textual evidence than a random member of the public or follower of that religion. (A priest would be a different matter as they have strong investment in the doctrine.)
Analogously, I will likely trust the opinion of the head of a Harry Potter fandom group, who has likely been involved in debates on the topic, about some point of the minutiae of Harry Potter lore (how old his parents were when they died for example). But that doesn’t entail accepting the premise ‘Harry Potter is real.’
Edit Upon more thought I think the issue may be that I was working from the premise “Theology professors are not invested emotionally in the results of a debate, but argue based on theory and textual evidence” which, while it has been my experience, may not be universal and may not be a premise you share.
I’d trust the head of a Harry Potter fandom group to get questions about the fictional character Harry Potter right, but not for questions about a hypothetical culture of real wizards, even if someone were claiming the books to have been based on such.
But (assuming for the sake of argument the books count as documentary evidence) would you say they had a higher probability of being right than: ‘someone who had read the books once’ or ‘someone who had never read the books.’ Or would you expect them all to be equally likely to be right or wrong?
Someone who has read the books, but isn’t a fan > a dedicated fan > someone who never read the books. I’d expect dedicated fans to over-count the books as evidence and to not give very different scenarios enough consideration, or fail to think of them at all.
But surely they are also more likely to have inconsistent beliefs that a person who had engaged in discussion wouldn’t? (E.g. misunderstanding a section in a way that could easily be noticed in discussion.)
Analogously very few theology professors believe in the literal creation story, for obvious reasons, and are likely to have slightly more coherent conceptions of free will/sin/miracles.
An expert who disagrees with the majority opinion in his field is an iconoclast. Such experts are usually at least acknowledged as experts by other experts, and, sometimes, their opinions turn out to be right all along.
A layman who disagrees with the majority of the experts in a field is a crank, and cranks that turn out to be right are rarer than winning lottery tickets.
I’m not convinced that the initial disclaimer is necessary. Would it make sense for a non-expert to base his opinion on that of one expert or a large group? Why does it make sense for an expert to base his opinion on his perceptions only instead of looking at his entire group?
Yet to understand the opinions on any nontrivial question, you have to become enough of an expert yourself to have at least some say in judging the validity of experts’ opinions.
In a field in which you personally are not an expert, the closest you can come to the truth is to accept the opinion of the majority of the experts in the age in which you live.
(Courtesy of my father.)
The problem is that the very fact that experts are listened to and respected creates incentives to become certified as an expert or to claim to be an expert, and that these incentives are non-truth-tracking. If you lust for fame and glory, or you want to seem original, or if you have a political agenda, or if you’re worried about what your publisher thinks will sell—all these sorts of things might help your bid to be certified as an expert or hinder it, but they’re not directly about the map that reflects the territory, and everything that’s not directly about the map that reflects the territory just adds noise to the process.
In a physical science with conclusions nailed down for decades, sure, don’t even think about questioning the consensus. But on an issue people actually care about (sorry, physics nerds, but you know what I mean), if you have a concept of epistemic rationality, and you know about Aumann agreement and updating your beliefs on other people’s beliefs as a special case of updating your beliefs on any data you get from your environment and you take all of this dead seriously, and you’ve read the existing literature, and you’ve spent many, many hours thinking about it, and you still find yourself disagreeing with the consensus—I’m not going to say you should forfeit your vision. You can’t trust the mainstream, because the mainstream is insane. The fact that you’re insane too doesn’t mean you can just trust the authorities; it means you have to lower your confidence in everything.
But please—don’t take my word for it!
I agree, except that a non-expert needs to have some rules by which they can distinguish fields which really do have experts (eg climate science) from those that don’t (eg theology)
Within theology, I will accept the views of theology professors (e.g. about the exact nature of the trinity) but not on the assumptions their field depends (e.g. whether God exists).
Weren’t things like the current positions on the trinity arrived by political processes, including persecution of dissenters as heretics? Why should such positions be expected to be more likely to be true, even assuming divine beings? Or do you mean you will accept their expert opinion on what the church positions are, their history and so on?
I am presuming a theology professor is more likely to have a view based on the arguments (if you can call them that) and textual evidence than a random member of the public or follower of that religion. (A priest would be a different matter as they have strong investment in the doctrine.)
Analogously, I will likely trust the opinion of the head of a Harry Potter fandom group, who has likely been involved in debates on the topic, about some point of the minutiae of Harry Potter lore (how old his parents were when they died for example). But that doesn’t entail accepting the premise ‘Harry Potter is real.’
Edit Upon more thought I think the issue may be that I was working from the premise “Theology professors are not invested emotionally in the results of a debate, but argue based on theory and textual evidence” which, while it has been my experience, may not be universal and may not be a premise you share.
I’d trust the head of a Harry Potter fandom group to get questions about the fictional character Harry Potter right, but not for questions about a hypothetical culture of real wizards, even if someone were claiming the books to have been based on such.
But (assuming for the sake of argument the books count as documentary evidence) would you say they had a higher probability of being right than: ‘someone who had read the books once’ or ‘someone who had never read the books.’ Or would you expect them all to be equally likely to be right or wrong?
Someone who has read the books, but isn’t a fan > a dedicated fan > someone who never read the books. I’d expect dedicated fans to over-count the books as evidence and to not give very different scenarios enough consideration, or fail to think of them at all.
But surely they are also more likely to have inconsistent beliefs that a person who had engaged in discussion wouldn’t? (E.g. misunderstanding a section in a way that could easily be noticed in discussion.)
Analogously very few theology professors believe in the literal creation story, for obvious reasons, and are likely to have slightly more coherent conceptions of free will/sin/miracles.
An expert who disagrees with the majority opinion in his field is an iconoclast. Such experts are usually at least acknowledged as experts by other experts, and, sometimes, their opinions turn out to be right all along.
A layman who disagrees with the majority of the experts in a field is a crank, and cranks that turn out to be right are rarer than winning lottery tickets.
I’m not convinced that the initial disclaimer is necessary. Would it make sense for a non-expert to base his opinion on that of one expert or a large group? Why does it make sense for an expert to base his opinion on his perceptions only instead of looking at his entire group?
Note that a relevant application of this heuristic would be global warming.
Warning: once you couple an argument to a current political debate, people quickly lose their ability to think rationally about it...
Only if they don’t make their saving throw. Dawkins gets a lot of deconversion stories in his email.
Yet to understand the opinions on any nontrivial question, you have to become enough of an expert yourself to have at least some say in judging the validity of experts’ opinions.
The heuristic seems to be about what to do when understanding the opinions of experts is not a practical option.