Podcast Teaser: Deferring to Experts

By Julia Galef

Several recent conversations here at Rationally Speaking seem to share a common thread: When, and how much, should we take someone's expertise into account in considering his claim?

Massimo argued at TAM that non-experts in a field aren't qualified to reject an expert consensus, such as that on anthropogenic climate change. I have countered that although that's often a good rule, we nevertheless need to evaluate whether a field is legitimate before accepting its experts' consensus — and that in doing so, we can't rely on the opinions of the people in the field to tell us whether it's legitimate.

And most recently, Massimo has taken Jerry Coyne to task for making a philosophical argument without having the necessary expertise. Many commenters, meanwhile, have objected that Massimo is being too strict in his criteria for how much training a person must have before being qualified to speak on a subject. [Massimo says that he actually made an argument against Coyne’s argument, and only in passing pointed out that it is no surprise that Coyne’s philosophy is bad, since he is not trained in the field.]

So we're going to tie these threads together for Episode #16, and ask some related questions, such as: If there is a lot of disagreement among experts on a topic (for example, in philosophy), should we take any individual expert's opinion less seriously? How much consensus is required before a non-expert should say, "OK, looks like this question really is settled"?

We also want to talk about whether there's a difference between these two kinds of expert opinions:

(1) "I believe X, based on lots and lots of empirical evidence which you don't have access to because you're not an expert."

(2) "I believe X, based on a logical argument which I will lay out for you now..."

It may be that it makes a lot of sense to defer to the expert in cases like (1), but not in cases like (2). After all, if the person has laid out all of his reasons for believing X, and you're not missing any relevant empirical evidence, can't you just evaluate his logic without having to take his expertise into account? Or do you need to tell yourself, "Well, I don't agree with his logic, but I'm not an expert so he's more likely to be right"?

We've already received a lot of valuable comments on those two recent posts, which we'll take into account in our discussion, but this is your opportunity to ask any additional questions or comment on the related topics we've raised. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Source: http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2010/08/podcast-teaser-deferring-to-experts.html

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