[ashwinne]

There’s a way around this, but it’s not fun or easy. It’s to listen to only the experts on that tiny sliver of a domain in which they are experts in. (And don’t listen to that expert when they talk about something that’s not their expertise .) This means listening to the expert on caves and not to the social media loving billionaire.

[Erem]

The tough thing about this approach is that the borders of each expert’s sliver of knowledge is not known to the reader, and maybe not even to the author themselves.

On top of that, individual experts still carry their own biases in their heads, and they lack any sort of editorial board to service the reader by separating knowledge from bias.

It’s easy for me to cast stones but I also have no answer. The best I’ve come to is to read broadly on topics you need to truly know and compare what you find in your sources. For less important topics just accept that you are likely off the mark and have much to learn.

[jameshart]

During the early days of the pandemic, as advice to wear masks started to propagate into the population, and laypeople started to have to develop familiarity with concepts like ‘N95’, a community of helpful experts (often nurses and doctors, people with actual qualifications and real experience) piped up to tell the world that they had been trained in the proper use of PPE, and that there were very important donning and doffing procedures that needed to be followed (not touching the outside of the mask, eg), without which ordinary untrained mask users were going to be exposed to enormous risks. If you tried to use such masks without following these procedures you might as well just rub a dead bat on your face.

The thing is, though, that the PPE handling requirements which practitioners like nurses and doctors are trained in, for working in a clinical environment with patients who are highly infectious or highly vulnerable to infection, are not the same as the PPE handling requirements for walking around a supermarket during a public health emergency. Public health usage of masks was not supposed to solve the same problems as masks solve in surgery or in infectious disease care contexts.

Experts are vulnerable to having highly specific knowledge about how something works in a very narrow domain, but overestimating how well that knowledge applies to even quite closely related nearby domains.

[bee_rider]

This is an aside, but I don’t really think donning and doffing an N95 mask requires expert knowledge. It is easy to screw up if you don’t know to be careful, and the stakes are sort of high. But you can learn to do it by, like, reading the material that comes with the mask and watching a YouTube or something.

Rather, I thought the anti-mask advice came before it was known that masks helped. At the time this was the prudent advice: what they don’t want is people acting like the masks will fully protect them.

[harry8]

Yep totally and I agree expertise in one field means nothing in another. But I'm also old enough to have listened to a theoretical physicist on NASA's issues including the space shuttle challenger disaster. His thoughts have become regularly cited across many domains. He most certainly was not a rocket engineer.

    "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

--Richard P. Feynman

[smegger001]

As I recall in that case he did a experiment to test his theory, (he chilled a sample of material the O-ring was made of and observered the result) and proved his hypothesis. The scientific method at work. You dont need to be a expert at everything when you have the resources to do adaquite research and experimentally test theories.

[dilyevsky]

How do you know if someone is an expert in something without being an expert yourself?

[xanderlewis]

It depends on the field of expertise.

Some fields are such that they are hard to be expert in, but it’s trivially easy to verify expertise when observed. For example, playing tennis. It’s easy to identify a good tennis player even if you can’t play tennis at all. Another classic example is cooking. Even the most caveman-like philistine knows good food.

On the other hand, for some fields, verifying expertise (or ‘mastery’) is as hard as achieving it. Academic disciplines — particularly technical ones like science — are examples. In those cases, you probably have to rely on a trusted authority to verify legitimacy. Without that, you can’t distinguish the accomplished experts from the crackpot blowhards.

[AlotOfReading]

I don't think it's as easy as you make it sound. I probably couldn't differentiate an expert Shandong chef from a generically skilled chinese chef, even if I like their cooking. It's difficult as a non-expert to even know what the differences are, let alone be able to see (or taste) them.

[duckmysick]

> For example, playing tennis. It’s easy to identify a good tennis player even if you can’t play tennis at all.

I'm not so sure. Identifying good talent is difficult when it comes to sports. There's an entire industry of scouts that try to find decent players ahead of the others. More so, they are tasked with finding out why a particular players is good. It's anything but trivial.

[xanderlewis]

I’m just demonstrating that the two categories are different, which they clearly are.

Not that one is trivial and the other is impossible. Of course, if you want to do any task well it becomes nontrivial.

[j16sdiz]

It could be both at the same time.

One can be a master in certain art, yet can't explain what's going on.

Think cooking: Many chef "searing steaks" to "keep juice in". It don't keep juice in, but it taste good.

Think language: Most native speaker can form grammatically correct sentence, but they can't really explain how. Yet many linguists, knowing how some languages work, keep bullshitting about another language.

[Jensson]

> Academic disciplines — particularly technical ones like science — are examples

Technical sciences are much easier than the social sciences. Social science is much more full of people who have no clue what they are doing than technical sciences, because technical sciences can be verified by experiments while social science is mostly about trust.

[danielvf]

There's an entirely legitimate question here behind this quip.

I don't think there's a magical answer, but one approach I've found is to try to be a mini expert in a tiny, tiny slice of a bigger area (usually bridging over knowledge from some adjacent area I know). This means that I can then evaluate those who talk about this tiny area, and get a good baysian guess as to there broader expertise from there.

[ashwinne]

Typically someone who has spent their life working/researching/teaching in that sliver of a domain. It is also important to remember that experts start losing their expertise once they have retired or no longer actively working in that domain.

So you are looking for someone with many years of work experience in being an IC or lead or CEO or a researcher with a lab or PhD in that domain with lots of papers in highly respected/ranked conferences/journals. In domains you have no idea about, you might need to first read a book or general article which links back to such experts/sources and then it is easy to find the cluster of those experts in that domain.

[glitchc]

This sounds like the appeal to authority fallacy.

[offmycloud]

My first test is to ask the expert to explain a complicated concept in their field, which I know a little bit about, in plain language that anyone can understand. Asking a few follow-up questions can usually separate the true experts from the fakes.

[ashwinne]

This is true! A general journalist who has studied up a domain and written an article within a week cannot stand up to this kind of deep questioning.

[layer8]

Why should we listen to you, are you an expert on who to listen to? ;)

[madmountaingoat]

I believe you have to listen to the experts on the topic, consider their biases and motivation, contrast the varying viewpoints, compare the philosophical or scientific foundations of the arguments against your researched world view, and either reach a conclusion or leave the question unanswered. More the later.

[lamename]

This is the correct answer. I'd add _multiple_ experts, because even they can disagree depending on the topic, which is expected and healthy. And even then, realize that experts can be wrong, but they're much less likely to be wrong than <random skeptic>.

[ashwinne]

That is right. Listen to multiple experts and see what is the cluster/mean of an answer they are crystallizing around. And if they all have different answers, then it means that there is no clear answer for your question (yet).