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Libby's avatar

Because I work in an area (litigation) populated with paid and hired experts with varying levels of credibility I would add that any kind of bullshit detector should incorporate coherent understanding of the speaker's motivations. Living an a world of increasingly targeted advertising, I default to the assumption that most people calling, emailing or popping up in my feed are trying to sell me something, and that it is unlikely to be something I want or need. It's not always true, but a decent first position.

Industry analysts are offering plausible arguments to protect their industry. Grant applicants are are protecting their future grants and talking up their interesting but not too out there research. The exception to the rule to trust top experts is that there are lots niche topics where the leading experts are captured or biased by the dynamics of their field, and outsiders really can identify things they are missing.

There is some kind of minimal rationality bar (Occam's Razor?) that these critiques need to pass, and I don't know that I have a more precise way to articulate the difference between Nate Silver posing questions about epidemiology and a random conspiracy theorist than to say that when they show their work one is vastly more persuasive to me than the other.

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Dylan's avatar

I thoroughly enjoyed this piece, but I want to flag two additional challenges to Wilkinson's prescriptions:

1. If you try to adhere to the consensus of most disciplines you will be right a substantial majority of the time. But you also guarantee that you'll be wrong a certain fraction of the time, because consensus does sometimes go through a revolution. And these occasional revolutions provide ammunition for those who make sweeping declarations about the fallibility of experts. In a nutshell, every crank arguing for a dissenting position claims his or her theory is the next heliocentrism or plate tectonics.

2. It can be hard for people to determine the consensus position of a discipline. I think climate change is a good example of this. There exists an entire industry of faux-experts intended to shatter the notion of consensus. In some cases, the experts have genuine credentials, publications, and academic standing. They are just outliers. Convincing people not only to trust the experts, but to remain skeptical of experts deviating from the consensus, is a true challenge.

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