[hintklb]

sorry but your take seems to be the anti-intellectual here.

You seem to think that the educated class got a monopoly on knowledge on that field, yet after that claim to know that experts are wrong all the time. The anti-intellectual take is to give up on trying to understand as much as you can in a field because you don't have the right credentials to do so. Yes, medical papers are not that complicated to read.

That doesn't make you more competent than your doctor. But it probably makes you a better advocate for yourself than your doctor is.

My point is: Don't discount yourself reading papers and doing your own research. Then work with your "credentialed experts" to come to an agreement. Don't ever think that the "experts" got your best interest at heart.

[rfrey]

Nobody who seriously read and understood the literature in a given field would issue a blanket dismissal of all the experts in that field. My experience is that reading papers and research leads one to understand WHY the professionals get it wrong - because you start to understand the nuances.

I'm not saying you issued such a dismissal, but the comment that started this thread did so.

[tombert]

I don't have a problem with reading papers and doing research, and I never once claimed that the "educated class" has or should have a monopoly on a field. You wouldn't know this, but for the first ten years of my career as a software person I was as a college dropout; I certainly am not someone who is going to get all hot and bothered about people having letters after their names.

That said, I have a tough time believing that spending an hour on Sci-Hub makes you better at diagnosis, yourself or otherwise, than someone who spent a decade being educated with decades of practicing. Thinking that you know better than trained experts because you have an understanding of the very beginning of a field is overwhelmingly tempting but is generally not based in reality. Usually the people who have actually been trained in the field know more about the field than a random person who read a few papers that they thought were "comparatively relatively simple".

I read papers all the time, usually formal methods, but sometimes other fields like medicine, and I will sometimes leave the medical paper thinking that it's "easier" than what I study, but I think that's just Dunning Kruger. I know more about formal methods, so I know a lot more about what I don't know, and thus I feel like it's harder. I don't know a ton about medicine, and since I don't know what I don't know it can feel like I know everything, and I have to fight this urge.

By all means, read about research in whatever ailment you have, I'm not really trying to discourage that, but I feel like dismissing experts in the field is almost the definition of "anti-intellectualism". If you find a study that you think is promising, bring it to your doctor. Hell, bring it to a dozen doctors, multiple opinions isn't a bad thing.

I just don't like the general "don't trust experts" thing that seems to be flying around certain circles now.