than back in 2017, when this was written.
By its fruit the tree is known, and the tree of expertise hasn’t been doing well lately. As Nassim Taleb recently observed: “With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers.”
… If expertise is dead, it’s because those who claimed it overplayed their hands. It’s not the death of expertise, so much as a suicide.
LOTS of us have become very skeptical of claims from the medical community, fueled by the coercive crap that came out of the COVID nonsense. They lied, people died, and so did their reputation. It’s not that they are usually wrong, it’s that they are wrong often enough that we need to be a bit careful and skeptical.
We are now forced to ask ourselves, “What else are they cocksure about but, in fact, totally wrong?” Salt? Dietary fat? Basic human psychological issues?
I mean, how many times did I teach university students about Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment or Milgram’s shock experiment? And yet they were all lies. Standard, foundational Psych 101 fare, and they were outright lies. Not even misinterpretations, but bald-faced lies.
So it’s no wonder at at all that a person might hear about a study and say, “Yeah, maybe…”
See, real science is a way of knowing that has many procedural safeguards built in. It is based on logic, and always is about likelihood and persuasion. Real science eschews facts, and focusses on probability and statistical relationships and logical argument. “Known science” is an oxymoron. That’s not how science works…
UPDATE: Here is a newer article. It’s a REAL problem! We are facing crisis of knowledge, and it is attributable almost entirely to a dishonest and self-dealing “scientist” class.
Those in charge, whom we were all urged constantly to “trust,” were either ignorant of existing literature warning of the consequences of the actions they were taking or arrogant enough to think that they could produce outcomes different from those previously forecast. In the end, the “experts” failed the nation and especially its children, who suffered disproportionately from their arrogance.