You are confusing opinions with evidence and facts. Obviously you acquire knowledge by reading papers where people are doing research and experiments and presenting evidence, analytics and all the facts from which you can make your own conclusions.
"It is up to each of us to form an opinion using the evidence that we have available."
This sounds noble, but in fact it is the way of madness.
Information does not stand on its own. Without the right background knowledge and experience you cannot assign any level of certainty to a deduction you make from a piece of information.
Just because you are capable of interpreting some of the information and forming reasonable deductions from those pieces does not mean you have an accurate holistic assessment. Your ignorance of the entire picture, while unintentional, will invariably lead you to make incorrect assumptions about the pieces you have not considered or do not understand.
An informed populace is, on the whole, a good thing, but the adage "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" still rings true. You simply have to accept that you will not, in your lifetime, be able to understand absolutely everything that anybody knows (never mind all that there is to know), and that you must cede your opinions about such matters to those who do, and if there is reasonable dissent, then you will have to reserve judgment altogether.
But isn't this evidence that you should rely on the conclusions of experts? What you are describing here is that amateurs fail dramatically to synthesize correct beliefs about a subject, but if you spend years immersed in that subject you are much more capable of doing this correctly.
When have some expertise, you should absolutely evaluate ideas on their merits.
When you lack the expertise to do that effectively, you should listen to the experts (ideally those that demonstrate that they are evaluating ideas based on their merits).
The trick is determine which questions you have the expertise to evaluate for yourself and which you are better of relying on experts to evaluate.
Unfortunately, this is an area where a large number of non-experts vastly overestimate the difficulty of the material vs their own level of knowledge. This leads to the increasing proliferation of misinformation and misleading analysis like yours.
Credentials are not the only way to acquire or demonstrate expertise. You say you are a "dude that likes to read research papers", how many epidemiological research papers have you read? How much time have you spent discussing those papers with epidemiological experts? Did you reach out to any of those experts to have them take a first pass as fixing any mistakes you made before you decided to post it publicly
Instead you decided to broadcast your ignorance with confidence about an area already ripe with misinformation that is costing people their lives.
This statement doesn't even make sense, where are you acquiring this knowledge if not from experts? Are you out there doing field research and conducting your own scientific experiments on every subject you're interested in?
I'd love to hear a couple examples of which "expert opinions" you've disproven for yourself and where you acquired the supporting evidence.
Honestly I DON'T trust my own reasoning. I can do this adversarial process as described in this article on my own, but that's incomplete. People outside of me have information and ways to view things that I don't. Others work as a discriminator and you update your opinions and views as more information comes in and challenges your own ideas. But it is because I don't trust my own reasoning that I read textbooks, seek out experts, and try to get as many views as possible, because no one has the complete picture.
This assumes that you can do that. If you are not an expert you can't possibly have the background to put things in the perspective.
This is not the issue of the ability to read and study, it's about missing variables and weighting evidence. If you don't have the background, you must spend weeks studying to get some hold of issues.
Argument from authority is fallacy of reasoning but it's not fallacy when learning and gathering relevant information. We you can reason only after you have learned the subject.
Social media is full of people who learned basic math behind SIR model and are building layman theories based on them.
> Experts in any field disagree. Why are opinions of some experts "misinformation" and "disinformation"
Find out if/why the experts are justified to hold their respective opinion, evaluate the facts and come to a conclusion. Just because someone says something does not make it true. Regardless if that person is an expert or not.
Nothing wrong with having an opinion, but having a strong opinion ("the solution is so obvious, i can solve this in 5 minutes") about an industry of which you known nothing of the inner workings come across as rather ignorant.
Your example of "I can tell when my food is burnt" is a poor one. Can you tell a quality scientific paper? Do you know what's required to get tenure? To get scientific funding? All of those are relevant as to why the scientific publishing system works as it does today. If you don't know those things, then you don't know how to solve the problem.
> you can't really form your own exper[t] opinion on every question you will face.
noone can be an expert in all fields, but you can seek multiple opinions from multiple experts, and generally the consensus is likely to be correct. Esp. if those experts are far apart, and unlikely to be colluding or associated.
The trick is how to do it efficiently, and not to fall into confirmation bias (aka, seeking only experts that agree with your preconceived notions).
Thats why one should be skeptical with "public opinion" that is often taken into account in making decisions such as for example science or bio-ethics. Informed or expert opinion is better.
Well people aren't doing that either. Expert opinion is a type of evidence. You still have to be investigating and questioning to apply reasoning to that evidence that can lead to a rational conclusion.
You're speaking from a position of ignorance, and that bothers me. This isn't an area where opinions matter. Either you learn the subject matter, or you don't. If you don't, you can only blame yourself for being at the mercy of professional advisors.
You shouldn't, but you should embrace skepticism and realize that is not science.
If you trust individuals making assertions based on unscientific methods because you value each individual's aptitude in the subject, fine. That is expert opinion.
If you trust an unscientific group consensus based on credentials that in actuality are worth far less than society values, then you're being naive.
No man, the texts are available, go read them. It takes time, effort and respect towards the perspectives of others to actually understand how complex things work, such as theories about human mind and social order.
Would you encourage someone with no experience in chemistry to start mixing chemicals without understanding potentially dangerous effects? Would you encourage someone who is not an engineer to construct a bridge without adequate preparation and planning? Experts can be authoritative because their experience grants them the ability to know better than non-experts in their respective fields.
There are a variety of strategies tractable to people who may not have a high degree of expertise in a given topic.
- Ask an expert you have developed substantial trust with for example your own general practitioner.
- Look at what the broad consensus in the field is amongst credible subject matter experts especially ones foremost and respected in their field. Look for institutions that are widely respected by people in the field which have both a history of integrity and longevity.
- Learn enough of the basics of science to know when people are presenting complete nonsense
- Learn enough of the basics of logic and persuasion to know when people are using THAT on you in place of good arguments or evidence.
On the last point look at this quip. It carefully avoids expressing a position although a probable position can be inferred. It implies there is credible disagreement amongst experts insofar as whether to get vaccinated. There is none. There is a clear consensus bucked by crackpots with a political ax to grind. It achieves this while asking an obvious question you knew the answer to. It is entirely manipulative. When you see posts like this assume the party advancing the argument has no real ammo.
I actually agree with Aaron, but I do think his experience is relevant. Yes, he's either right or wrong regardless of his track record, but the intended reader doesn't know whether he's right or wrong, and won't know it without trying it. If you don't have reasonable way to verify whether what somebody says is true, looking at their credentials is probably the best you can do.
In practice, we do that all the time. For example, you probably have an opinion on global warming, or whether smoking is bad for you, but did you read the relevant papers, or just take the word of the researchers you thought were most credible?
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