How far do you trust authorities?

Great Debates
1

I’m not exactly sure how to phrase this question, so please bear with me.

When I’m trying to decide what I believe about complex scientific issues, I put tremendous weight on what experts in the field say. I believe that vaccines are safe and effective, not because I understand all the science behind vaccines, not because I’ve conducted my own epidemiological studies, but because the bulk of mainstream experts in the field assure me that they are safe. I believe that computers work because of binary logic gates not because I understand exactly how such gates open and close, not because i’ve built my own gate, but because people who have studied computers assure me that that’s how they work.

And I believe that global warming is significantly caused by humans not because I’ve created my own computer models, not because I’ve studied the last millennia of climate data, but because the bulk of mainstream experts in the field assure me that they are safe.

It often seems to me that dilettantes in the sciences get themselves in Alexander Popian “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing” trouble. They decide that vaccines cause autism, and they conclude that scientists are motivated by the support they get from pharmaceutical companies when they say that vaccines are safe. They decide that AGW is a hoax, and they conclude that scientists are motivated by the support they get from liberal college heads when they say AGW is real.

I frankly don’t have time–nobody has time–to become an authority on every area of science. I believe that our society’s specialization of knowledge is a tremendously powerful system, enabling us all to benefit from specialists who devote their lives to one narrow topic, rather than forcing us all to dabble in everything and master no topic.

In short, I think the good money is on trusting the scientific experts. I think that non-specialists who argue with the specialists rarely, if ever, have any business doing so.

This isn’t to say scientific controversy has no place. Rather, the place for controversy is among people who have dedicated their lives to studying the topic.

What do other folks think?

(Note that I reserve the right to change my opinion on this during the thread; I’ll try to make it clear if I do so)

2

You are letting others, the authorities, determine the reality you accept. You are letting them program your brain. We are designed to design our own reality. Question authority, question everything you know and learn how to construct your own reality.

That is a premise that Timothy Leary espoused in a video ‘How to operate your Brain’ - which you can find on youtube.com. Some may question the methods that he arrived at that, some will outright oppose in discrediting him because of his LSD use, but that does not make what he said untrue or discredit his message in itself. I highly recommend listening to it, it is a conclusion that I have reached w/o drugs and believe it to be what we are meant to do.

3

I weigh the expertise of a person as a factor certainly. In the vaccine issue for example, I could believe a celebrity mother… or the vast majority of medical community. One of them has credible authority, behind them. The other doesn’t.

There are other factors to consider as well. For example, just because someone says they are an expert doesn’t make them right. They have to be able to support their position and demonstrate what leads them to each step of their conclusion. In scientific matters, peer review is the key to the basis of authority. For example, consider the cold fusion ‘discovery’ years ago. They made a claim and had a position of authority. But the review discovered a flaw in their process. The system behind the authority rejected the claim.

If a professor with 45 years of research in volcanism told me something about the inner working of a classic shield volcano, I would tend to believe them without much question. If a ‘professor’ at the discovery institute told me that man co-existed with dinosaurs, I’d have significant doubts. The position of authority isn’t key. It’s the methodology and process behind the authority.

4

Well, I’m glad to know that your mind is sufficiently powerful to have the body of knowledge of all the relevant “experts” so as to draw proper conclusions. Indeed, I’m sure that’s exactly what your next paragraph will further delineate.

I have one curiously minor question though: By whom are “we” designed to design our own reality? And how have you come to that conclusion? Does belief dictate reality? Or is reality merely a pawn relegated to rearrangement at our very whim?

Oops, I was wrong.

Instead of listening to those who want to pollute our minds with the best information humans have been able to yet compile, which have been tested, and debated among the relevant “experts” in the fields, you get your truth from Timothy Leary. Well, that’s surely your right, but it won’t do to suggest that listening to experts in their relevant fields is any worse than listening to a guy whose sole claim to fame, near as I can tell, is being a whackjob. Now, I’m not saying he’s outright batshit crazy, but he did think that, “[since] he would soon migrate into space, [he] was opposed to the ecology movement.”

Food for thought about Leary: “According to his initial plan to leave the planet, 5,000 of Earth’s most virile and intelligent individuals would be launched on a vessel (Starseed 1) equipped with luxurious amenities.” Presumably, in his grandiose plan, he wouldn’t have actually been migrating to space based on this latter explanation of who’d be invited.
Dork, while it’s not the best move in the world to take things on faith simply because a smart person says so (experts are wrong from time to time), it’s not practical to investigate everything in your life. Even less practical is gaining the knowledge to do so for when the occasion(s) arrive(s). So, at the very least, get the opinions of several of the noted, prominent people and see how it sounds. Otherwise, your choices are limited to going back to school and studying for a long time to find out what they’re telling you.

5

I tend to trust scientific opinion. It depends how it is presented though. If it is the amazing scientific concept du jour presented through tabloid media, I may question the motive for pressing the point.

Re: arguing with experts. I do like talking to people who know more than I do. Otherwise I’m talking to someone who can’t tell me something I don’t already know. I hope I don’t piss them off too much with all my questions.

Other authorities? I tend to think religious authorities are trying to gain control over me, though it really depends on the particular case.

I’m pretty sure Republicans want to rape my mom.

6

This is something worth pointing out: I’m the same way, and it’s because, while I’m no expert in epidemiology, I know enough about the scientific method as currently practiced (especially the process of peer review) that I trust the conclusions it draws with a fairly high level of confidence. If someone declares themselves a scientist, and other scientists accept the claim, then I trust that the person’s claims will go through the process of peer review, and I trust the claims they make within that process. I don’t necessarily trust a climatologist who makes a claim about bird evolution, though, especially if such a claim appears on the op-ed page of a creationist newsletter.

7

It depends upon my sense of an ulterior motive. Politicians, for example, seek power, which is a big red flag. Scientists seeking public funding get red flags too - when they have no self-interest (obviously they have an interest…) in the matter then I trust them far more.

8

I don’t. Ever. That doesn’t mean I need to become a Medical Researcher, but I’ll be reading the study methodology before I admit your conclusions into my decision-making process.

All input is weighed, filtered, and examined before being allowed to remain. I have an Empirical bent, but anecdotal evidence may be accepted if it supports an otherwise logical and functional conclusion.

I’m going to be wrong sometimes, the experts will also be wrong sometimes. That’s called life. But I take full responsibility for my conclusions and actions - no one else can take the credit for my successes or the blame for my failures.

9

I somewhat agree. By default, I trust the scientific process and those who participate in it. When funding becomes important–that is, when someone’s study is funded by someone who has a vested interest in a certain outcome–that lowers my trust in their conclusions. And when there’s a massive body of research that says one thing, and a small body of research saying the opposite, and the small body of research is generally funded by a group with a vested interest in their conclusions, then you’re right, I tend to get pretty skeptical of that small body of research.

However, I’m not aware of any area of scientific endeavor since the method was formalized in which the prevailing conclusions of the mainstream scientific community were incorrect and were motivated to their incorrect conclusions by issues of funding.

Question: why is it scientists seeking public funding specifically who raise red flags with you? Wouldn’t scientists seeking private funding from entities with a vested interest in a certain outcome get much greater red flags?

10

See, I strongly doubt this is true. Have you ever taken Ibuprofen? Did you read the study methodology of the Stage III clinical trials before taking it? Do you do that for every drug you take?

What about for every food additive?

What about for every cleaning chemical you use?

How far do you take this? Do you study the design of an airplane before you hop aboard, guaranteeing to your satisfaction that it won’t lose structural integrity during flight?

At a certain point, I think everyone ends up trusting the authorities.

11

Ironic as it was a meteorologist and climatologist, Wegener, who proposed Continental Drift and was derided as a meddling outsider.

12

The question really is how one weighs evidence. Lots of factors go into that. Certainly the credentials and expertise of the person providing the evidence is significant, but must be balanced with other considerations - such as, is this a question which has widespread agreement among the experts? Often, scientists (including very knowlegeable and expert ones) disagree on matters, so it is no good relying on just one … but when there is widespread agreement, you are on safer ground.

Plus, there are issues of bias and self-interest to consider in some cases. Bias isn’t necessarily a bad thing - a scientist may be “biased” by a political motive that you happen to agree with; but it may colour their opinion. As always, a conclusion arrived at against interest is more likely to be reliable.

13

Absolutely good example. Had I been around during this controversy, as a non-geologist, I would’ve agreed that Continental drift was likely incorrect: I lack the skills to evaluate the scientific argument successfully. This is a case where I would’ve gotten it wrong.

But in most cases of people proposing controversial theories outside of their specialties (megadoses of vitamin C, HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, vaccines cause autism, black people are intellectually inferior, etc.), the smart money is against the “meddling outsiders.”

14

Don’t you believe, based on someone elses’ writing, that a Jewish carpenter from the first century AD created the universe?

Constructing your own reality is a piss-poor solution when you want to build a bridge or create a vaccine against polio. If you want to live your life consumed in daydreams, that’s fine, but don’t pretend that they have the weight of actual science, engineering or scholarly learning.

A single person, can’t re-create millennial of scientific knowledge by pondering at his desk.

Far out, man. :smiley:

15

Because it’s my money, mainly, and the public purse is vastly deeper than the private one. In American terms, this might be described as Pork. Ironically, I feel safer with scientists funded by private concerns as long as the research is peer-reviewed and the funding is not concealed. Just because someone’s research is privately funded doesn’t mean that they’re wrong. As long s it’s all out in the open, it’s fair.

I’m also concerned that certain scientific communities seem very incestuous. I’m concerned that peers may review papers more positively in the expectation that their own papers will receive similar favours. Of course the reverse may also hold: at least one community is famous for the relish with which they find fault with papers. It sees to me that outsiders should be involved: they may lack the knowledge to challenge the data, but they may well be more likely to pick up errors or simply say, for example, “I’m sorry, but you’ve constrained things so tightly that the result is meaningless” whereas someone in the field might give it a pass. But perhaps that’s an issue for a separate thread.

16

But for the most part, you don’t need to be an expert in the field to evaluate the data or the methods used. The available vaccine evidence can be explained in perfectly simple terms, without any reference to authority figures; it is overwhelmingly against any vaccine/autism link. Similarly for vitamin C mega-doses; the only “evidence” for these having an effect on HIV is from direct applications of vitamin C to cells in vitro. You don’t have to be any sort of biology researcher to know that this does not prove that ingesting vitamin C tablets will work. While establishing the mechanisms behind certain effects is often damnably difficult, proving the existence of cause and effect is usually much less so.

I plug it everywhere, but Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science book is an excellent read on this sort of thing. He goes through most of the medical examples you’ve given, demolishing their evidence, and more importantly, illustrating how easy it usually is to evaluate an empirical claim.

Wegener’s theory of continental drift was initially ridiculed because he had no explanation for the actual transport mechanism; his first proposal was that the continents ploughed through the crust itself, not a particularly persuasive idea. His model also had the USA and Europe moving apart far faster than they actually were. So while it’s easy to mock his contemporaries now, and claim they rejected him as an outsider, it’s also the case that his data and theory were incomplete and flawed. Obviously he was vindicated, but that’s not to say his conclusions were inescapable as first presented.

Maybe, if status were all there is to go on, but it’s not. Nor is there always a clear delineation between insider and outsider. The problem with giving up on your own critical faculties is who do you delegate your decisions to? The addiction to authority figures plays merry hell with popular science reporting, for example. As journalists abdicate responsibility for interpreting the data themselves, the concept of journalistic balance shifts. It’s no longer about an even-handed interpretation; balance is achieved if you get two authority figures, one on each “side”, and give them an equal say. And then who do you believe?

The obsession with this sort of “balance” is what has given most people the impression that there’s some sort of scientific controversy on vaccines and autism, for example. There is none. All of the statistically significant data indicates that there is no link. And yet most people, when questioned, will tell you that there is scientific evidence both for and against. It’s because there’s been no attempt in the media to address the evidence; they’ve just got two sets of talking heads and stuck them in the story. Job done.

17

After thinking about this, I realize that my trust for experts or authorities is the exact inverse of how big a thing they are trying to sell me. (And everyone is always trying to sell you something on some level) If some expert tells me that eating an apple once a week can help my health, I’ll generally trust them; the cost/benefit is low, as is the risk. On the other end of the spectrum - to reference one of your examples - though I do believe that the globe has warmed over the past century, and much of it may have to do with human activity, I don’t trust the people telling me how I have to change my life and the we have to change world production/economy. They are asking for drastic changes and predicting Armageddon. I don’t trust those tactics.

18

(I’m self-plagiarizing the following from a post to another board.)

When I’m considering whether to credit an authority, I try to think consciously, “Do I have a rational basis for believing that this person is evaluating the evidence in the way that I would if I had the time and talent to study it myself?”

That formulation covers up a lot of potential for recursion, such as when evaluating whether to accept someone’s authority on the credibility of another authority (a priest’s on the Bible’s, say). A more tangled recursion comes in when I’m deciding whether to credit an authority’s assertion about how to evaluate evidence in general, including the evidence that someone is an authority.

Nonetheless, despite these loops, I think that it all bottoms out eventually. In the end, I’m evaluating, with my own reason, evidence to which I have direct access. (Here I’m using “my own reason” and “direct access” in a sense sufficiently weak so that they uncontroversially happen at least sometimes.)

One might worry that this is a recipe for only crediting authorities with which one already agrees, and hence for intellectual stagnation. But I don’t think so. You can, on these rational grounds, credit an authority so much that you will believe the authority over some other result of your own reasoning, so that you modify your basic assumptions. This will lead to changes in the way that you evaluate evidence, which in turn can result in different authorities “making the cut”.

19

I trust everyone, until I can think of a reason not to.

20

I trust authorities when there isn’t anyone else to trust.

What are the properties of the general linear group on polynomials? What happens when you mix dichloromethane with propanone? At what date was agriculture first practiced in the Americas? For such questions I’d consult an appropriate scholarly source because there isn’t any alternative. Certainly many scholarly sources are rife with errors and omissions, but that’s okay because the issues they tackle aren’t of much importance.

For the issues that are of great importance in how I lead my life, I tend to ignore the experts. The more important the issue, the less I care about what the experts think. Take diet. There’s no shortage of experts out there telling me to eat more of A and less of B. Even if they agreed with each other, there’d be no sense in following them because they change their minds every few months or years. Eat their healthy diet now and five years down the road they’ll tell you that you’re eating an unhealthy diet. Far better to simply stick with a common sense diet: eat more fruits, veggies, and whole grains and less fat and sugar.

The bottom line is that whatever source I’m confronted with, I read it and see whether it’s logically sound. Doesn’t matter whether it’s ancient Greek philosophy, a journal of biochemistry, an op-ed in the Washington Post, or a brochure handed out at the supermarket. I judge by content and not by source.