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To you and @Raziel, who commented below, I can only ask: What rigor? Who are these experts and what has been the outcome of their advocacy?
From where I am sitting, the 'experts' of the western world have for the past decades managed to run the most peaceful and technologically advanced societies in human history into the ground. Why look at anything they have done with veneration?
And even then we are presupposing that 'rigor' has ever been a relevant thing at all beyond an aesthetic preference where people with power modulate academia and media towards their own wants.
Which experts would you look to if not ones in the western world? Are you saying there is no expertise, no right and wrong, only power? If so, you do you, but in a nominally rationalist setting that has rules of debate, why are you here? You should prefer a forum where posters do not use words but just pipe bellowing noises into other people's homes at a volume set by their net worth.
Ethos is not the same as Logos. And the conceit of this forum is that the latter is more valuable to the pursuit of truth.
This holds practical regardless of the possibility of knowledge.
I don't think I follow your meaning here, do you mind spelling it out slightly more?
In rhetoric, the three modes of persuasion are Ethos, Pathos and Logos.
Ethos, which means "character" is an appeal to the authority or credibility of the speaker. This is typically done by being a notable figure in the field, demonstrating mastery of jargon or being recognized by established authority.
Expertise, insofar as it means anything, relies on Ethos. An expert is someone who can provide such bona fides and reason in forms that give him credibility.
Logos, on the other hand, which means "word", "discourse" or "reason", is a mode of persuasion in which the speaker uses logic, patterns and generally relies on the internal consistency of his claims or thesis.
This forum has been founded in an intellectual tradition that ultimately traces its lineage to Aristotle and Socrates who both held that good thinking comes from a focus on Logos and a avoidance of Pathos and Ethos. Socrates himself is well known to specifically downplay his own authority because he believed that this would enable a better pursuit of Truth.
So when you ask which experts one would look to, it seems the obvious answer in such a space would be none of them. We're here to think by ourselves and discuss that with people who disagree so that we may perhaps approach something close to the truth.
Relying on authority rather than looking at the evidence and making up your own mind would be the antithesis of that.
That's quite interesting, but this line of thinking feels close to Cartesianism. If we can't appeal to authority at all, we have to discount almost all information about the wider world – we don't know what any countries' GDP is, what the tax rate is, whether there's really a war in Ukraine etc, unless we trust in certain authorities whose information we have no reason to strongly doubt. We wouldn't be able to discuss the world economy at all.
I would have thought a more pragmatic version of this philosophy would have us interrogate and challenge the data and views of experts, and hold them lightly, always seeking to check that the experts are abiding by similar evidentiary standards as we would aspire to ourselves, but realising that it is impractical to check everything and therefore being good Bayesians about what we can't be sure of.
I don't find skepticism to be impractical at all. I just find people would feel it more comfortable to know more than they actually do.
All empirical statements are contingent. A pragmatic stance would be to deal with this reality by embracing epistemic humility. The idea we can adopt some framework that negates this problem is in fact the idealism in this scenario.
I know it's a strong temptation to delegate thinking, but it is impossible. Not without giving up autonomy. Feel free to do so, but then I'll want to talk with the people you get your reality from. Not with you.
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On that topic, what do you think about Trump's solar tariffs on Vietnam and Thailand?
I don't really know that particular supply chain enough to tell what the effect will be. My broad take is unless we get an actual global economic crisis out of this shock, the general rise of SEA as a manufacturing hub will continue because the underlying factors remain positive and the US isn't the only game in town to sell your widgets anymore. I think the internal politics of ACFTA members are more important.
But to be fair, I have no investments in places that are specifically targeted by Trump's tariffs so I can afford not to care that much.
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