Earlier quoted context omitted.
Goalposts notwithstanding you have to admit the list is kind of hit or miss. Whenever their job isn't listed they're either retired or were never in a related field. For example you listed Harvard, Columbia, Monash, and McGill above. Half the people from those institutions are either unqualified, retired, or both. Plus there's places like "ElectroSensitivity UK" which aren't scientific institutions. PS - I fully admi…
> the list is kind of hit or miss. It seemed that way to me as well, but the real point is that it's irrelevant how well or poorly we judge those people. What matters is the facts they or others present. > you're being far too defensive Defensive of what? I haven't even expressed a position yet, other than "logical fallacies are bad" and I'm pretty willing to stand by that one. Are you here to argue the converse? To…
This matters if your expertise are in the subject to which the facts belong, otherwise it means little, particularly in a subject which requires an incredible amount of knowledge of an an incredible array of subjects.
I can look a bunch of absolute facts regarding 5g signals and make an assumption, however, because my expertise lie far outside the realm of 5g, an expert can easily come along afterwards and show me why these facts–while accurate–mean nothing to the subject at hand and why a completely different set of facts are what one should be looking at.
Expertise absolutely matters. And this is coming from a person who is confident that a greater than zero amount of companies would happily pay people to add noise to a topic in order to poison us for a fraction of a percentage boost in their quarterly growth.
Expertise matters on complex subjects and attempting to pretend as if all ideas are equal no matter who they come from or who receives them is a recipe for disaster.
The collective We really need to get back to a place where we freely and happily say “It’s really outside my realm of expertise. You should track down an expert.” and way more often daily and regularly “I don’t know.”