[Qwertious]

I disagree, this is a "fallacy fallacy" - you named a fallacy which lumberjack (apparently) used, but that doesn't actually make the argument wrong.

And you seem to ignore the fact that getting a degree takes most people multiple years, and that "student" is an occupation. If you follow the evidence, people can't learn everything because it takes way too much time.

[woodman]

> I disagree, this is a "fallacy fallacy"

I disagree, this is a "fallacy fallacy fallacy". You seem to ignore the fact that I did not suggest that people can learn everything. I suggested that people learn enough logic to use it as a tool to make learning everything else unnecessary.

Also, the scarcity of time being used to justify the economically reasonable appeal to authority, in the context of global warming / scientific method consensus, may be the most unintentionally funny thing ever.

[coldtea]

>I suggested that people learn enough logic to use it as a tool to make learning everything else unnecessary.

Which doesn't even make sense. Logic by itself is useless. Could as well talk about some abstract unexisting universe.

It's only when you feed it items ("learning everything else") that you make something out of it.

[woodman]

Wow, I see I'm going to have to break this down Barney style in order to reach you:

The silly argument that started this all off was that you have to be an expert in every field in order to examine complex systems or problems that span multiple domains. This is simply not true, because a complex idea depends upon simpler ideas. These ideas can be formalized, where scientific theory occurs at the edge nodes and verification occurs at well connected nodes. This would allow an individual to select a layer of abstraction to work on - not unlike software development.

This isn't very far off from the present system of scientific journals and peer review.

[coldtea]

>This is simply not true, because a complex idea depends upon simpler ideas. These ideas can be formalized, where scientific theory occurs at the edge nodes and verification occurs at well connected nodes.

Only this is a very naive reductionistic epistemology, and not enough to cover modern science.

[woodman]

That would only be true if the finest component of information in "modern science" could not be represented in true/false/unknown. I know that back in the day folks working on cybernetics struggled with something kind of like this in neural networks, where they were stumped by nonsteady state output (they were hoping to represent everything in true/false). The solution was to just increase the layer of abstraction in representing the output, leaving enough room on lower layers to describe nonsteady state as another potential output state. Problem solved. If you've got an example demonstrating your concern, that would be helpful.

[coldtea]

The reductionistic part is in the very belief that there's such a thing as a "finest component of information" in the first place.

>If you've got an example demonstrating your concern, that would be helpful.

What I say is that sufficiently rich theories such as those we have today don't have "finest components" in the sense of being parsable down to some kind of "atoms" that are independent of the overall structure.

The whole intelligence lies in the connections between the components, and verifying that them are individually "correct" doesn't say much.

[ics]

In other words, inverting the conclusion of a fallacy is itself a fallacy.