[drugstorecowboy]

History is filled with examples of this going very wrong, because it turns out that everyone's "observable reality" is different, filled with bias they are blind to, and people in general are very bad at differentiating between "I saw some people doing something I don't like" and "This is a society wide issue that needs to be corrected immediately". Science, when done properly, is the antidote to that. Many things are counterintuitive and involve levels of nuance that just aren't accessible to a layman.

In spite of my comments like you I also don't believe I have to wait for experts to explain things to me or spoon-feed me opinions. I also realize that I don't have the ability to do large-scale studies and that my off-the-cuff opinions on issues really aren't worth much. I am certainly not trying to say that the way things are done today is the correct way. Like you I find that many "experts" with long lists of credentials give lackluster opinions and likely don't deserve their title. Financial interests have corrupted things etc... However, in my mind, going back to a "well its obvious to me so lets make some laws" society is a step backwards and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. When incentives are properly aligned and people act in good faith, studies and experts can certainly offer information far more accurate and better than anything I can do as an individual.

[remarkEon]

Can you name one? Because I can name dozens of examples of policy making based on expert consensus that ended up not only wrong but catastrophically so. That's not really the point I was making, however, which was more constrained on the idea that I somehow have to listen to people write papers instead of people who actually have skin in the game. Parents have skin in the game, and you can tell which kids have a social media addiction from a football field away.

>Science, when done properly, is the antidote to that. Many things are counterintuitive and involve levels of nuance that just aren't accessible to a layman.

So what? This thought train leads to regular people not having a say at all, because they're stupid or somehow unequipped to read a paper, which is very funny to me. If "layman" (i.e. a stupid person who doesn't have the time a sophisticated multi-variant regression analysis of the impacts of social media usage on children) looks around and decides that he wants to vote in favor of banning the thing that's causing problems, that's America, baby.