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Why don't Americans trust experts? Just ask a paranormal investigator

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Re: Why don't Americans trust experts? Just ask a paranormal investigator

#21

Post by NalNezumi »

Not just a problem in US but I'd say one of the issue is that we have expert inflation, and not all expertise are equally valid.

We have some insight from Decision theory. Klein and Kahneman have both identified required properties for valuable expert intuition (or knowledge, tacit or not) to be available to aquire. (here's a simplified version of this by Veritasium [1])

Most people would see through the conartist claiming "I'm a roulette expert. I've done roulette for 10 years, I have 10 years of roulette expertise, you should listen to me when it comes to what number you should bet on a roulette!" Yet we all fall for other form of expert where their problem domain follow similar structures that makes expert knowledge acquisition either hard or impossible.

But every expert with a PhD want to claim their expertise to be as valid as the actual valid expertise. Combine that with internet, short form (tweet etc) communication, we tend to dumb down the conversation using "expert" to cover all the domains, to the fraud-experts advantage.

Certain fields, you should probably trust the expert almost blindly (Emergency Care, firefighters) but others, maybe not (clinical psychologist, policy maker, economists). Problem is that if we just bundle them all up, people will end up not trusting either.

"bundling up" is a recurring tactic by conartists of all kind (subprime mortgage anyone?)

If we would "rate" different field on their expertise validity (or scientific validity etc) easily understandable by layman, we might regain some institutional trust.

But that would cause a crazy amount of resistance from certain fields (macro econ, psychology, nutritional science, etc) and in real term wouldn't happen

[1] Vertiasium https://youtu.be/5eW6Eagr9XA?feature=shared

Re: Why don't Americans trust experts? Just ask a paranormal investigator

#23

Post by kccqzy »

billy99k wrote: post #4

Covid taught me that there is a large percentage of the population that trusts the experts to the point of ignoring all critical thought, which is just as dangerous.

Here is an example: in the early days of Covid around February 2020, the messaging from public health authorities was that it was important to wash hands regularly but wearing masks wasn't important. This went against my non-expert intuition and thought, since news out of Wuhan was already clear that it was like a kind of pneumonia, so it affected the lungs. I discussed this with my mom who shared the same thought. I went on to buy masks when they were still readily available back in early February 2020. Later I learned that the reason public health authorities de-emphasized masks was because they thought they needed to prioritize masks for healthcare workers due to a foreseen supply chain shortage. This of course made sense from a whole population perspective but not from an individual perspective. Do you prefer to be selfless and do what's good for the whole society or do you want to be selfish and do what's optimal for yourself?

Here's another example: the various screenings with age cutoffs. For example colorectal cancer screening is only recommended for people above 45; statins are only recommended for the prevention of cardiovascular disease after age 40 with risk factors. I've had a few primary care physicians who follow these guidance like gospel and refuse to do screening because I haven't met the age cutoff. The reason why these cutoffs exist is mainly a cost/benefit analysis for the entire population, not an analysis tailored for an individual.

Re: Why don't Americans trust experts? Just ask a paranormal investigator

#24

Post by reylas »

Apreche wrote: post #18

The logic follows that if experts are in charge, and experts are correct, then we will see positive outcomes from following expert advice. The US, and other parts of the world, has seen some decades where experts have been in positions of authority, but there have not necessarily been positive outcomes. Does this mean the experts are wrong? Nope. It’s for a variety of reasons, but perhaps the largest is that experts…

"A climate scientist knows best", lets talk about this one as it is a perfect example of lost trust. It is not corruption that destroys the message, but constantly being incorrect.

Just a warning, I may agree with them overall, but they are constantly getting the numbers wrong. We have been 3 years away from the point of no return for the last 20 years. I am old enough to remember the "ice age" that we were going to enter. There are a ton of video clips showing Al Gore predicting things that never came to past.

I read the science and I agree that climate is changing, but to the layperson, they have been saying wrong things for years now and they are tired of hearing them "cry wolf". The moral of the "cry wolf" story is that the falsehoods are what causes people not to be prepared. It is not helping the cause.

Re: Why don't Americans trust experts? Just ask a paranormal investigator

#25

Post by sorcerer-mar »

Bnichs wrote: post #19

>If our institutions can communicate their work better, supernatural beliefs will dry up a bit. We’ve seen this historically. I feel like this article misses the reason why people distrust institutions. Being "kicked out of the tent" is no doubt part of it, but it's more that the institutions themselves have stopped trying to communicate in good faith. In the past 50 or so years we've seen almost every institution (i…

Nah, you're exhibiting the fundamental problem which is effectively conspiratorial thinking. Not in the UFO sense, and I don't mean it disparagingly at all -- I mean literally ascribing behavior to some type of superstructure that doesn't really exist.

"The healthcare system" is not one thing that "says" stuff. For every component of the education system that was trying to eliminate trades, there were others trying to combat it, and neither side was merely the decision of any conscious agent that could be said to be deciding or "saying" anything. All of the outcomes and the things these systems "say" are emergent phenomena from a confluence of countless forces. Sometimes they yield bad outcomes!

But that doesn't mean you can just toss out the system, largely because unless you alter the larger dynamics that produced that system, any replacement will just come to mimic the prior one. The individuals involved hardly matter.

Re: Why don't Americans trust experts? Just ask a paranormal investigator

#26

Post by sorcerer-mar »

goalieca wrote: post #15
caseysoftware wrote: post #7

> To rebuild public trust. Hongoltz-Hetling argues that institutions must respectfully engage with unconventional beliefs and offer inclusive frameworks instead of dismissive critiques. No, we don't need "inclusive frameworks" because some beliefs are idiotic. We need experts who put reason and data before political agendas and they need to be able to say "I don't know" instead of lying.

It’s bad when an expert doesn’t say “I don’t know”. It’s worse when they lie because “we don’t want the public thinking dangerous thoughts”.

Nearly every example I've encountered of experts allegedly lying under that rationale was actually a case of the public being effectively illiterate.

E.g. experts saying "we don't know if masks work" (stated over and over) the general public heard as "we know that masks don't work" (I've found exactly one instance of this being stated by a US public health expert, USSG Jerome Adams).

Re: Why don't Americans trust experts? Just ask a paranormal investigator

#27

Post by sorcerer-mar »

egberts1 wrote: post #10
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covid taught me that there is a large percentage of population that won’t trust experts to the point of ignoring critical thought. Also dangerous.

VAERS database shows otherwise. We now have 8,000+ mRNA products awaiting field testing and trials.

What does this comment mean? What does VAERS show and what do the MRNA products awaiting testing indicate?

Re: Why don't Americans trust experts? Just ask a paranormal investigator

#28

Post by mike_hearn »

sorcerer-mar wrote: post #25
Bnichs wrote: post #19

>If our institutions can communicate their work better, supernatural beliefs will dry up a bit. We’ve seen this historically. I feel like this article misses the reason why people distrust institutions. Being "kicked out of the tent" is no doubt part of it, but it's more that the institutions themselves have stopped trying to communicate in good faith. In the past 50 or so years we've seen almost every institution (i…

Nah, you're exhibiting the fundamental problem which is effectively conspiratorial thinking. Not in the UFO sense, and I don't mean it disparagingly at all -- I mean literally ascribing behavior to some type of superstructure that doesn't really exist. "The healthcare system" is not one thing that "says" stuff. For every component of the education system that was trying to eliminate trades, there were others trying t…

The health care system is heavily subject to licensing of various kinds, and academia is heavily defined by grant funding. If just a tiny handful of people in the government decide the healthcare system will say X, then it will say X.

Re: Why don't Americans trust experts? Just ask a paranormal investigator

#29

Post by rightbyte »

kccqzy wrote: post #23
billy99k wrote: post #4

Covid taught me that there is a large percentage of the population that trusts the experts to the point of ignoring all critical thought, which is just as dangerous.

Here is an example: in the early days of Covid around February 2020, the messaging from public health authorities was that it was important to wash hands regularly but wearing masks wasn't important. This went against my non-expert intuition and thought, since news out of Wuhan was already clear that it was like a kind of pneumonia, so it affected the lungs. I discussed this with my mom who shared the same thought. I…

> Later I learned that the reason public health authorities de-emphasized masks was because they thought they needed to prioritize masks for healthcare workers due to a foreseen supply chain shortage.

Feels like rationalising? No masks were the prior recommendation for the public and status quo.

Re: Why don't Americans trust experts? Just ask a paranormal investigator

#30

Post by sorcerer-mar »

mike_hearn wrote: post #28
sorcerer-mar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, you're exhibiting the fundamental problem which is effectively conspiratorial thinking. Not in the UFO sense, and I don't mean it disparagingly at all -- I mean literally ascribing behavior to some type of superstructure that doesn't really exist. "The healthcare system" is not one thing that "says" stuff. For every component of the education system that was trying to eliminate trades, there were others trying t…

The health care system is heavily subject to licensing of various kinds, and academia is heavily defined by grant funding. If just a tiny handful of people in the government decide the healthcare system will say X, then it will say X.

As a case in point, GP refers to "the Healthcare system leveraged our own wellbeing against their profits"

That would point toward the business interests of actual provider organizations (like hospitals) or insurers, who have different incentives from each other and very different incentives from individual healthcare providers, who also have very different interests (and are very different people on a variety of dimensions) from those in academia who are "heavily defined by grant funding."

Perhaps you could share a concrete example of what you mean, because right now we're talking about 4 or 5 completely distinct, individually gigantic industries that all interact to produce "the healthcare system" and its behaviors.

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