Trusting the Scientific Community

[GoodKat]

When it's obvious that someone is completely unqualified to form an educated opinion on a scientific matter without investing a prohibitive amount of time and effort, would they be logically justified in simply trusting the majority of experts in their field?

 

[ImprobableJoe]

We do it every day... what else CAN we do? I'm sure there's one person out there who can perform surgery, play guitar, design a car, write a poem, build a computer, cook a gourmet meal, and breed dogs and orchids... and that's not 1% of the possible specialties out there. You have to trust experts to a certain degree.

More importantly, if you don't trust experts, who are you going to rely on instead? People who AREN'T experts? Coin toss?

You hear that sort of thing all the time: "The experts don't know everything!" Sure, but you and I know even less!

 

[Ozymandyus]

It certainly depends on what it is you are talking about though. You should certainly trust an expert in their particular field, but sometimes I think scientists try to project their knowledge of their field onto other issues: evolutionary psychology for example. The whole idea of genetic predisposition towards certain behaviours I think is vastly overblown by these people. I trust them on many matters relating to their field, but I do think there is a certain tendency for us to try to apply our specialized knowledge to everything else and then claim we know best about THAT. And that tendency should be questioned to some extent.

Here's a pretty good article about evolutionary psychology btw, to help explain the phenomenon... http://www.newsweek.com/id/202789

Anyway, I think most real world situations are a complex amalgam of various topics, and though many scientists can Talk about the issues from their point of view, you can't take their word as a full view of the situation. Though you were of course talking about the people in a particular field - but the problem is that most scientists set the boundaries of their field very far out, and are often willing to claim something as their domain and explain it through that particular lens even if it has other aspects.

 

[Aught3]

Yeah, they would be justified in trusting experts in the field. There are some important considerations though - Is the expert agreeing with the majority opinion? Is the expert talking about his/her own field? Is there any personal bias? Is this person actually an expert? If the answers are favourable then it is reasonable to trust the expert and accept what they say.

Here's a pretty good article about evolutionary psychology btw, to help explain the phenomenon... http://www.newsweek.com/id/202789

I don't know rape is natural and men who raped women in the aftermath of a village raid (or something) would probably leave more children than those who didn't. It would be a very small advantage but that's all natural selection needs. It's a neat hypothesis but if you wanted to show a genetic connection you would have to do a massive human genetics study of rapists vs non-rapists to see if you could find any differences. I suspect it would be more general as in increased aggression but I'm not sure - an interesting question at any rate.

 

[Ozymandyus]

I don't know rape is natural and men who raped women in the aftermath of a village raid (or something) would probably leave more children than those who didn't. It would be a very small advantage but that's all natural selection needs. It's a neat hypothesis but if you wanted to show a genetic connection you would have to do a massive human genetics study of rapists vs non-rapists to see if you could find any differences. I suspect it would be more general as in increased aggression but I'm not sure - an interesting question at any rate.

See, this is exactly the sort of shoddy thinking that doesn't belong in science. You can clearly see that such a trait would be exhibited something more general such as an increase in aggression which has all kinds of other influences on survivability, but then are trying to specify it as a reproductive advantage in a particular situation that only existed during a blink of evolutionary time. I mean, it's not as if there were cross raiding villages for 10's of thousands of years or even thousands of years.

When we DO find such villages, one or the other is wiped out or taken over within a lifetime or two. To even account for a single generation or two of selective pressure where the raper would probably be More likely to have vengeful aggression directed towards him which is decidedly disadvantageous... And ignores the fact that the tendency to rape would not be only after raids on other villages but also within his own village. It's just BAD science and very shortsighted, ignoring hundreds and thousands of other factors.

 

[Aught3]

It doesn't have to be a village raid just a situation where they can get away with it. While a rival male is away, during hibernation, in some sort of mass gathering. To my knowledge rape behavior has never been shown to have a genetic component but with a clear link to production of genes in the next generation I think the question clearly has to be asked. Hardly 'shoddy' thinking.

 

[Squagnut]

When it's obvious that someone is completely unqualified to form an educated opinion on a scientific matter without investing a prohibitive amount of time and effort, would they be logically justified in simply trusting the majority of experts in their field?

They may or may not be justified in trusting the majority of experts, but they're certainly not justified in disagreeing with any of them. Disagreement with something you don't understand is argument from ignorance/personal incredulity.

 

[e2iPi]

When it's obvious that someone is completely unqualified to form an educated opinion on a scientific matter without investing a prohibitive amount of time and effort, would they be logically justified in simply trusting the majority of experts in their field?

There is no way around this. We absolutely MUST accept the consensus of the scientific community.
If you are sick, you go a medical doctor. Doctors have dedicated a large percentage of their life to the study of disease and and human body. I would have to say that their opinion carries a great amount of weight on those issues. Now by the same token, I would likely be very skeptical if that same doctor tried to tell me about the intricacies of the standard model. They may even have an undergraduate degree in physics, but it is still far removed from their area of expertise.
Of course, there is always the option of studying the published, peer-reviewed literature on an issue in order to form an opinion. The problem here is that I do not have the requisite medical knowledge to even begin to navigate the medical literature. I would quite quickly become lost in the medical jargon and probably have difficulty even finding articles relevant to the issue I am attempting to research.
This leaves the option of reading articles which have been designed for the layperson, and these, by necessity, do not give enough information to form an educated opinion on the subject. That said, however, I can use information gained from the non-scholarly publications to at least have an idea if my doctor has gone insane and should therefore seek a second opinion.
Even within our areas of expertise, we rely on those who came before us. The stories like those of Kepler and Einstein where vast amounts of the preceding scientific knowledge are replaced are so noteworthy because they are so rare. The vast amount of scientific progress has been built upon an explicit trust that previous work is reliable. Of course this wanders away from the topic since we do have the requisite knowledge to form educated opinions in these cases.
Anyway, that's my .25.

-1

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

Not quite. When you say thrust the specialist, you can only do this in matters that you don't know, sense you don't know what it real means in the first place you are nowhere in a near position to even adress the issue and so wheter you agree or not makes no difrence because you don't know what you are agreeing or desagreeing.

However the boundaries of the science fields are not rigid and beneat it is far more interconected then it apears to the popular surface (and far diffrent).
I can say this because I have some formation in some scientific areas, those who don't may not easily realise what I mean, and what i want to say is even if some one works in a difrent field of your expertise you can shut it down in the parts of his work that falls under your area of expertise. For instance imagine that I didn't new crap about electrical engines (I do but lets assume that I don't) if some one says that he can get a power output of x while drawing power from a termal generator working between temperatures y and z, I may (for the sake of this argument) not know crap about electrical engine but I do know about thermodynamics and I also do know that the most power you can get out of a reservoir between y and z is the carnot relation, for wich if the claimed power output x exceeds it I automatically know that he is full of shit.

If the said claim doesn't fall anywhere near my area of expertise then there are other people on that area of expertise to do the beating, I personaly don't have to even look into it because:
1. Not being my area of expertise it will not affect my area of work (so in a way it wouldn't affect me the sligthest if it is true or false)
2. The hell if I'm going to check every single thing some one does in this planet, there are other persons with a stake in it so let them handle their own shit.

(if there is no one else on that area of expertise or nowhere near in the position of analising some ones point of view, then he is a hoax and made it all up, because he is a human none the less and he borned stupid like everyone else, if he/she can't present a sound argument on how he/she learned it then... you know the answer)


Botom line is, if you are in seriouse position in desagreeing or not you are fit to beat it of. And you can not desagree with what you don't really know what it is in the first place.