pull down to refresh
119 sats \ 4 replies \ @Undisciplined 30 Oct \ parent \ on: What They Didn’t Tell You About the Scopes Monkey Trial culture
It's worth remembering that "trusting the experts" and "following the science" required one to be an avid supporter of eugenics at one point.
Enter my favorite scene from It's Always Sunny
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgk8UdV7GQ0
Epistemic humility is too much to ask from our intellectual superiors
reply
The two big medical ones that come to mind for me are bloodletting and lobotomy. I think people don't really get the issue though. The issue is as you say, trusting the experts without question. Not that someone got something wrong in the past. That will always be true. But questioning the orthodoxy of science and really society is opposed with great prejudice. I get it to some extent. There are many simple minded people that are easily duped. But they are easily duped by scam artists and people that are just arrogantly wrong.
Let the best ideas win.
reply
I'd put it this way: It's fine to trust experts, but it's stupid to hold a differing view in contempt when you understand neither the official position nor the dissenting one.
None of us have time to learn everything, so we rely on heuristics. If your heuristic is to just trust the official position, that's fine, but have some humility about it.
reply
Yeah, that's good.
reply