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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   4359 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 19, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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If we had Athenian democracy by random citizens I could probably forgive this huge mistake, but the Experts™ who make up the administrative state literally have one job

Their one job is to give options to politicians. The politicians then make choices based on that advice..plus an idea of what will be popular among the people they were elected by and want to be elected by again.

If most people want something done, then politicians will do something. This is a feature not a bug. Democracy isn't optimized for the best outcomes. It's the rough outcomes that the majority of people want, tempered by advice, depending on how strongly the people feel about it. That's it.

Giving people political power is not so we get better decisions, it's so that we get decisions that are somewhat representative of what the people want. Even if what they want is stupid or counter-productive. That's the deal.

Their one job is to give options to politicians. The politicians then make choices based on that advice..plus an idea of what will be popular among the people they were elected by and want to be elected by again.

I might agree with you.... except that approximately 9000% of the experts gave the advice of "lockdowns aren't severe enough, every single one of your constituents is going to die". This was blatantly wrong- it wasn't a best guess at the time, it's obviously stupid in retrospective, readily available data made it obviously wrong then, it was a political narrative to make ruling conservative parties look bad. And the experts constantly spitballing fantastic hypotheticals about how it could be true was something they fed to politicians as facts.

So yes, experts take the blame here.

I hear a lot of people talk like this and I genuinely wonder what ‘experts’ means here.

If it’s the statements of scientists as filtered through news or politics, then I don’t really think of that as ‘expert’ since it’s mixed with other idealogical frames. I don’t actually know what the expert is saying in that case, or if they even represent a qualified authority.

In general, when a headline references ‘Experts’ or ‘Researchers’, I replace it mentally with ‘Some guy’. Not because I don’t trust experts or researchers, but because broadly the media has a bad record of science communication.

That's a fair point, but communications given directly by government employed experts like Fauci and Wallensky were pushing the exact same trivially-false chicken little syndrome drivel, just with fewer basic math errors.

except that approximately 9000% of the experts gave the advice of "lockdowns aren't severe enough, every single one of your constituents is going to die".

This seems to not be correct. See the recent leaks from Boris Johnson, where he privately says the expert studies show him that lockdowns are not necessary and that the risk to under 40's is negligible. Then a week later announces another lockdown. Not because of what government experts were telling him, but because of public pressure on his MPs.

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