I agree that the difficult issue is defining the set of experts (although weighting expert opinion to account for known biases is an alternative to drawing a binary distinction between appropriate and inappropriate experts). I would think that if one can select a subset of expert opinion that is representative of the broad class except for higher levels of a rationality-signal (such as IQ, or professed commitment in approximating a Bayesian reasoner), then one should prefer the subset, until sample size shrinks to the point where the marginal increase in random noise outweighs the marginal improvement in expert quality.
What is your own view on the appropriate expert class for evaluating creationism or theism? College graduates? Science PhDs? Members of elite scientific societies? Science Nobel winners? (Substitute other classes and subclasses, e.g. biological/geological expertise, as you wish.) Unless the more elite group is sufficiently unrepresentative (e.g. elite scientists are disproportionately from non-Christian family backgrounds, although that can be controlled for) in some other way, why stop short?
On Verizon, I agree that if all one knows is that one is in the class of ‘people in a dispute with Verizon’ one should expect to be in the wrong. However, one can have sufficient information to situate oneself in a subclass, e.g.: a person with 99th percentile mathematical ability applying well-confirmed arithmetic, debating mathematically less-adept representatives whose opinions are not independent (all relying on the same computer display), where concession by the reps would involve admitting a corporate mistake and setting a precedent to cut numerous bills by 99%. Isn’t identifying the optimum tradeoff between context-sensitivity and vulnerability to self-serving bias a largely empirical question, dependent on the distribution of rationality and the predictive power of such signals?
Robin,
I agree that the difficult issue is defining the set of experts (although weighting expert opinion to account for known biases is an alternative to drawing a binary distinction between appropriate and inappropriate experts). I would think that if one can select a subset of expert opinion that is representative of the broad class except for higher levels of a rationality-signal (such as IQ, or professed commitment in approximating a Bayesian reasoner), then one should prefer the subset, until sample size shrinks to the point where the marginal increase in random noise outweighs the marginal improvement in expert quality.
What is your own view on the appropriate expert class for evaluating creationism or theism? College graduates? Science PhDs? Members of elite scientific societies? Science Nobel winners? (Substitute other classes and subclasses, e.g. biological/geological expertise, as you wish.) Unless the more elite group is sufficiently unrepresentative (e.g. elite scientists are disproportionately from non-Christian family backgrounds, although that can be controlled for) in some other way, why stop short?
On Verizon, I agree that if all one knows is that one is in the class of ‘people in a dispute with Verizon’ one should expect to be in the wrong. However, one can have sufficient information to situate oneself in a subclass, e.g.: a person with 99th percentile mathematical ability applying well-confirmed arithmetic, debating mathematically less-adept representatives whose opinions are not independent (all relying on the same computer display), where concession by the reps would involve admitting a corporate mistake and setting a precedent to cut numerous bills by 99%. Isn’t identifying the optimum tradeoff between context-sensitivity and vulnerability to self-serving bias a largely empirical question, dependent on the distribution of rationality and the predictive power of such signals?