Recall that on Monday I started to discuss this essay by Ted Gioia, and I argue that he has misunderstood the so-called "replication crisis." Scientists and philosophers of science have long known that many published findings are incorrect. Science isn't always right, but it gets more right over time. Furthermore, there is an increasingly influential movement away from frequentist statistics toward Bayesian statistics. Without getting too technical, I'll just say that there is a growing tendency to express findings in terms of probabilities rather than definitive conclusions.
While I think this is more epistemologically valid, ironically, perhaps, it is precisely the reluctance of scientists to speak with absolute certainty that has undermined some people's respect for expertise. Gioia goes on to a second assertion, that "Public distrust of experts has reached an intensity never seen before." However, the example he gives has nothing to do with "public" distrust, but rather with the specific actions of the Trump Administration to expel federal employees who disagree with or might undermine Dear Leader. He goes on to state that:
The only experts who still possess authority are blue collar ones. The public still wants to hire the best plumber or car mechanic or hair stylist, and will pay more if these workers have established a reputation for expertise. But the expertise of white collar professionals is derided at every turn.
Well, I don't know how people feel about civil engineers or economists, but while public trust of physicians and hospitals in general did decline during the Covid 19 pandemic, this was a recent and contingent phenomenon, and:
Overall, 78% of people say they trust their primary doctor. Significant differences exist, however, between different groups of people, with older adults (90%), white people (82%), and high-income individuals (89%) being much more likely to say they trust their doctors. Among people who report lower trust in their doctors, 25% said their doctor spends too little time with them and 14% said their doctor does not know or listen to them.
In fact, in 2019, "Some 91.9% of respondents said they had trust in doctors. In the survey, physicians outranked six other professions including IT workers, plumbers, ride-hailing or taxi drivers, housecleaners and auto mechanics."
Sorry Ted. It turns out that most people do indeed trust their physicians more than they trust their plumber or car mechanic, and those who do not aren't doubting their physicians' expertise, they aren't liking how they interact.
The fact is that most of the quacks who tout "alternative" medicine do in fact have M.D.s, which they proudly and aggressively tout. The father of the vaccine/autism fraud, Andrew Wakefield, is a medical doctor (no longer licensed) who published his fraudulent findings in The Lancet, the most prestigious medical journal there is. The prominent climate change skeptics (of whom few to none are left) all have Ph.D.s. The problem is not that people don't trust experts, it's that there are a whole lot of people out there claiming to be experts who are actually full of shit.
I agree this is a problem, but it's not the same problem Gioia is writing about. Part Three next.
2 comments:
As I read this post, I thought about how technology can remove us from directly experiencing life. For most of Homo sapiens' time on earth, the experience has been 100% direct: hunting and gathering to survive, which is conducive to living in the present. There was no electricity, and our ancestors experienced the wonders of the skies and Earth and nature in a way that was constant and undeniable. The advent of agriculture, building, and then towns and cities transformed humans' perception of the world.
As an example, when I was a young man living in New York City, I would think about how one single building contained numerous individuals in their rectangular dwellings, hundreds of people in one structure, all separated from each other, many of them living not only in enclosed physical spaces but also escaping into the confines of their mind, separated from others in a way that just wasn't possible when Homo sapiens lived in roving bands. This was not always a helpful phenomenon, because people can become isolated without meaningful connection to others and to the world around them.
The advent of the printing press and books allowed increasing numbers of people to spend more time in the world of concepts, away from direct experience--and then radio gave whole societies a way to experience a common perceived reality that was exciting, even though it was intangible. At first, television did the same, as families and groups of people would gather around it. This was, of course, before television was used as a tool to manipulate people, except for advertisements, which were easily accepted because they were understood to be necessary in order to fund the shows that were being broadcast.
Now, the digital revolution has made it possible for people to live in the world of their earbuds, PCs and tablets. Even when they're crossing the street, students at colleges and universities appear to be lost in their digital worlds, oblivious to the cars and other vehicles around them that could snuff out there lives in a second. And the drivers of those vehicles? Well, I still think that my grandmother, who grew up in a small shtetl in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, perceived the world through a car window in an entirely different way than myself, because I've been trained through television to look at the world around me as a passive thing that I'm viewing. I can't ask her now, because she passed away in 1988, but I'm willing to bet that her experience of being in an automobile was one of seeing the world pass by her at speed, while I, as a child of the television age, perceived the world around me when I was in a car as a more two-dimensional, flat environment through which I was moving in my personal space--ostensibly, the only perceivable reality there was.
All of this leads me to believe that in a world in which people are separated from each other and from a shared reality, it's possible for the people controlling the "programming" on any given channel or media conduit to brainwash listeners and viewers who have been trained to live in the world of their mind, freed from the need to directly experience and substantiate the world around them and their place in it.
I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this, but these are the thoughts that came up for me after reading today's post.
Rather than focus on trusting whether someone is telling the truth, perhaps we should talk about recognizing when we are being lied to. I can't stand to watch enough of Fox "News" to come up with a full list, but I can make some starter suggestions. Liars tend to:
- Be very sincere,
- Be very certain of the truthfulness of their claims,
- Rely on individual stories rather than cite numbers,
- Introduce facts that don't apply to the issue,
- Ask leading, unanswered questions and imply that the answer is obvious,
- Dismiss objections,
- Bad mouth objectors and alternative explanations rather than defend their claims,
- Jump quickly from argument to argument so quickly that it is hard to completely process each one,
- (Your corrections and suggestions go here) ...
Instead of looking for more reasons for your position, you could try poking some holes in their harangues.
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