I think this is an important point, especially when experts are talking to other experts about their respective fields. I once had a client call this “thinking in webs.” If you have a conclusion that you reached via a bunch of weak pieces of evidence collected over a bunch of projects and conversations and things you’ve read all spread out over years, it might or might not be epistemically correct to add those up to a strong opinion. But, there may be literally no verbally compelling way to express the source of that certainty. If you try, you’ll have forgotten most of the evidence, and even if you don’t, you’ll end up with an audience that’s bored to tears and (even if they’re trying to understand) able to easily explain away each individual piece of evidence.
One canonical example might be Niels Bohr telling Einstein to quit telling God what to do. Not everything Einstein thought was right, but he clearly had and used very strong intuitions, based on thinking about known examples, regarding the nature of physical law. These were difficult to express and (rightly) would not, themselves, be considered scientifically valid evidence for drawing conclusions. IIRC I think that specific retort was in regards to “God does not play dice,” which AFAIK most physicists then and since have disagreed with. But, depending on what specifically Einstein meant, and how the universe is actually operationalizing the underlying physics we see as quantum mechanics, it is still entirely possible he was right, but in a different way then he would have expected at the time.
I think this is an important point, especially when experts are talking to other experts about their respective fields. I once had a client call this “thinking in webs.” If you have a conclusion that you reached via a bunch of weak pieces of evidence collected over a bunch of projects and conversations and things you’ve read all spread out over years, it might or might not be epistemically correct to add those up to a strong opinion. But, there may be literally no verbally compelling way to express the source of that certainty. If you try, you’ll have forgotten most of the evidence, and even if you don’t, you’ll end up with an audience that’s bored to tears and (even if they’re trying to understand) able to easily explain away each individual piece of evidence.
One canonical example might be Niels Bohr telling Einstein to quit telling God what to do. Not everything Einstein thought was right, but he clearly had and used very strong intuitions, based on thinking about known examples, regarding the nature of physical law. These were difficult to express and (rightly) would not, themselves, be considered scientifically valid evidence for drawing conclusions. IIRC I think that specific retort was in regards to “God does not play dice,” which AFAIK most physicists then and since have disagreed with. But, depending on what specifically Einstein meant, and how the universe is actually operationalizing the underlying physics we see as quantum mechanics, it is still entirely possible he was right, but in a different way then he would have expected at the time.