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Motte and bailey - motte is "top-down designed by experts", bailey is "designed by experts". Yes, experts aren't Yahweh himself who writes the inerrant Law in an instant. But many experts did intentionally design the systems, and then, yes, as in every other field, modify them when they seemed to fail. Just like mechanical engineers do. The Chief Economist at Google was, in fact, hired due to his deep understanding of specific areas of microeconomics, and used that knowledge to design (of course in an iterative way!) google's ad auctions, which was very profitable for google. I entirely fail to see how this is different from hiring a mechanical engineer. I think the general distaste for "experts" is incredibly confused - some of them are bad, but they're not all bad, aside from in fields like psychology or social science - and that's just those fields being bad, not experts being bad.
You're missing the point. We are told to "trust the experts" when they make their predictions. However, when the predictions are at best guesses that need to be validated in practice, then we objectively cannot "trust the experts."
If the media and politicians would honestly tell us that these opinions are imperfect and cannot just be assumed to work, I would have no problem with that. But of course they don't say that, because they use the 'expert opinion' as a way to win debates and project power.
Arguing that some experts can be trusted more than others just proves my point that the generic implicit or explicit demand to "trust the experts" is wrong*. In fact, it allowed the fraudsters to hide behind those that do better. In debates, if you question how experts are presented to us, the defenders will invariably point to the better experts, rather than adopt a nuanced position where some experts are better than others.
After all, the nuanced position is not compatible with the power games being played.
* For example, I almost never see a justification being given for why a certain expert is any good.
I am not defending "Trust The Experts" as said by people on covid. (But I am not convinced that the, uh, non-experts (?) would've done better averaged over a large number of scenarios) I am defending the enormous value of the group of people the "experts" generally refers to!
From above:
Depending on the field somewhere between 1/3 and 2/3ths of the 'experts' are 'systemically' using their discipline, effort, and intelligence to be productive and useful.
My original comment:
Which I stand by! The experts are wrong a lot, but the question isn't if you trust them, it's who to trust when or how to figure out yourself how to do better. The former is quite hard and the latter is even harder.
I see it constantly? You're appealing to an apparently omnipresent media or discourse, and more accurately specific segments of it you take issue with. Which media, which discourse, etc? I agree that a lot of it has very big deep problems, but I think a combination of a vague 'it' / 'them' being criticized and a lack of appreciation for the positives of the system leads to critique that doesn't really mean anything.
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