The triage of truth: do not take expert opinion lying down

[C C]

https://aeon.co/ideas/the-triage-of-trut...lying-down

EXCERPT: The thirst for knowledge is one of humankind’s noblest appetites. Our desire to sate it, however, sometimes leads us to imbibe falsehoods bottled as truth. The so-called Information Age is too often a Misinformation Age.

There is so much that we don’t know that giving up on experts would be to overreach our own competency. However, not everyone who claims to be an expert is one, so when we are not experts ourselves, we can decide who counts as an expert only with the help of the opinions of other experts. In other words, we have to choose which experts to trust in order to decide which experts to trust.

Jean-Paul Sartre captured the unavoidable responsibility this places on us when he wrote in Existentialism and Humanism (1945): ‘If you seek counsel – from a priest, for example – you have selected that priest; and at bottom you already knew, more or less, what he would advise.’

The pessimistic interpretation of this is that the appeal to expertise is therefore a charade. Psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated the power of motivated thinking and confirmation bias. People cherry-pick the authorities who support what they already believe. If majority opinion is on their side, they will cite the quantity of evidence behind them. If the majority is against them, they will cite the quality of evidence behind them, pointing out that truth is not a democracy. Authorities are not used to guide us towards the truth but to justify what we already believe the truth to be.

If we are sincerely interested in the truth, however, we can use expert opinion more objectively without either giving up our rational autonomy or giving in to our preconceptions. I’ve developed a simple three-step heuristic I’ve dubbed ‘The Triage of Truth’ which can give us a way of deciding whom to listen to about how the world is....

MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/the-triage-of-trut...lying-down

[RainbowUnicorn]

https://aeon.co/ideas/the-triage-of-trut...lying-down

EXCERPT: The thirst for knowledge is one of humankind’s noblest appetites. Our desire to sate it, however, sometimes leads us to imbibe falsehoods bottled as truth. The so-called Information Age is too often a Misinformation Age.

There is so much that we don’t know that giving up on experts would be to overreach our own competency. However, not everyone who claims to be an expert is one, so when we are not experts ourselves, we can decide who counts as an expert only with the help of the opinions of other experts. In other words, we have to choose which experts to trust in order to decide which experts to trust.

Jean-Paul Sartre captured the unavoidable responsibility this places on us when he wrote in Existentialism and Humanism (1945): ‘If you seek counsel – from a priest, for example – you have selected that priest; and at bottom you already knew, more or less, what he would advise.’

The pessimistic interpretation of this is that the appeal to expertise is therefore a charade. Psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated the power of motivated thinking and confirmation bias. People cherry-pick the authorities who support what they already believe. If majority opinion is on their side, they will cite the quantity of evidence behind them. If the majority is against them, they will cite the quality of evidence behind them, pointing out that truth is not a democracy. Authorities are not used to guide us towards the truth but to justify what we already believe the truth to be.

If we are sincerely interested in the truth, however, we can use expert opinion more objectively without either giving up our rational autonomy or giving in to our preconceptions. I’ve developed a simple three-step heuristic I’ve dubbed ‘The Triage of Truth’ which can give us a way of deciding whom to listen to about how the world is....

MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/the-triage-of-trut...lying-down

•  Are there any experts in this field?
  
•  Which kind of expert in this area should I choose?
  
•  Which particular expert is worth listening to here?
  

If there is genuine expertise to be had,

the second stage is to ask what kind of expert is trustworthy in that domain,

This thinking is quite clearly flawed.

[Syne]

This thinking is quite clearly flawed.

My thoughts exactly.

[Yazata]

The so-called Information Age is too often a Misinformation Age.

It's the human condition. What other people tell you isn't always true. It was probably worse in ancient and medieval village cultures where everything was heard word-of-mouth and took the form of folklore.

There is so much that we don’t know that giving up on experts would be to overreach our own competency. However, not everyone who claims to be an expert is one, so when we are not experts ourselves, we can decide who counts as an expert only with the help of the opinions of other experts. In other words, we have to choose which experts to trust in order to decide which experts to trust.

That suggests an infinite regress. So I agree with the author that we ultimately have to make the decision on who we are going to believe for ourselves.

The pessimistic interpretation of this is that the appeal to expertise is therefore a charade. Psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated the power of motivated thinking and confirmation bias. People cherry-pick the authorities who support what they already believe. If majority opinion is on their side, they will cite the quantity of evidence behind them. If the majority is against them, they will cite the quality of evidence behind them, pointing out that truth is not a democracy. Authorities are not used to guide us towards the truth but to justify what we already believe the truth to be.

True. I think that that's becoming ever more prevalent in our brave-new-world. It isn't just laypeople doing it, the professors are doing it too. Many "studies" (in the "social sciences" particularly) seem to be designed to confirm an author's own hypotheses. We see opinions on controversial matters becoming litmus tests determining whether academic job candidates are hired and whether they achieve tenure. We have seen opinions on controversial matters determining whether particular individuals are published in the top journals and even attempts to black-list individuals with unpopular views.    

If we are sincerely interested in the truth, however, we can use expert opinion more objectively without either giving up our rational autonomy or giving in to our preconceptions. I’ve developed a simple three-step heuristic I’ve dubbed ‘The Triage of Truth’ which can give us a way of deciding whom to listen to about how the world is....

MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/the-triage-of-trut...lying-down

1. Are there any experts in this field?

In many cases there is no simple yes or no answer. Economic forecasting, for example, admits of only very limited mastery. If you are not religious, on the other hand, then no theologian or priest can be an expert on God's will.

Right. It isn't always easy to make this judgement.

It's easy to mislead laypeople here, since there are many fields that admit of great technical mastery in no end of arcane skills (often jargon-filled and mathematical) yet whose relationship to whatever assertions are being made remains a bit suspect. Economic models might be hugely technical, filled with partial differential equations and incomprehensible vocabulary, but the models might still be pretty much useless for predicting what the future of the economy (let alone stock prices) will be. Theology is probably another example of what may or may not be empty 'mastery'. Theologians can snow you with technical vocabulary but they are still just assuming the faith commitments upon which everything they say is based. Theoretical physicists seem to me to be doing it when they hide metaphysical speculations behind an impenetrable wall of mathematical symbolism, then pronounce it a "proof". Physics is authoritative, right? Laypeople have to just believe the physicists... right?

2. What kind of expert in this area should I choose?

If there is genuine expertise to be had, the second stage is to ask what kind of expert is trustworthy in that domain, to the degree that the domain allows of expertise at all. In health, for example, there are doctors with standard medical training but also herbalists, homeopaths, chiropractors, reiki healers.

Another thing to consider is whether the 'expert' is speaking about his/her specific area of expertise. We often tend to think of experts, whether famous scientists (Einstein!) or famous university professors as if they were demigods, whose opinion must be authoritative on any conceivable subject. So we often see physicists (Feynman!, Sagan!, Tyson!) being quoted as authoritative voices on philosophy or people like Dawkins and Coyne posing as experts on religion and epistemology more generally. I'm willing to accord Dawkins and Coyne considerable authority when they are speaking about evolutionary biology, but they aren't people that I would choose as a reliable authorities in religious studies or epistemology. (Subjects in which they appear to have very little formal training.) They are just opinionated laypeople like everyone else when they are speaking outside their areas of expertise.

In the same way, I'm unmoved by the political or moral views of any university professor (even professors of ethics or political science, see #1) and believe that my own political views and moral intuitions are at least as good as most of theirs.

3. Which particular expert is worth listening to here?

The trickiest situations are where the domain admits significant differences of opinion.

I'm an old philosophy major, so I'm used to that. What I do is accept that there are a variety of perhaps equally plausible views on some issue and accept particular individuals as knowledgeable about one of the contending views. If I wanted to find an expert on the 'qualia' arguments, I might look to David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel or Frank Jackson, despite my thinking that those arguments aren't convincing and that they are very probably wrong.

One also needs to factor in a proposed expert's own preexisting biases, which are often very hard for a lay outsider to know. If an investigator's work simply confirms preexisting belief originally adopted for non-scientific or non-scholarly reasons (politics, financial interest, religion or whatever) then it's hard to be hugely moved. We have been taught to be skeptical of research findings that tobacco isn't unhealthy that were bought and paid for by tobacco companies, but I'm probably even more skeptical about the objectivity of anything written on gender by an avowed feminist or 'queer theorist', or findings critical of corporations or market economics produced by socialist professors. But laypeople often know little or nothing about those pre-existing biases and are simply told that Professor X holds some prestigious chair at some 'top-tier' ivy-league university.

Even in the world of scholarship, distinguishing rhetoric from reason is often exceedingly difficult. From the layman's perspective, it's often impossible and it often devolves into another religious-style matter for faith.