Also, I've got to say, "cancelling" anyone who's ever wrong from being an "expert" in the public sphere sounds like a really poor idea. Everyone is wrong sometimes and that's a crazy standard which would have tons of its own perverse incentives, probably even worse than the ones scientific journals and the like have now. Do you want scientists on the record terrified of saying anything besides the most vague and unfalsifiable statements? It's an untenable situation if you bring it to its logical conclusion. I do agree with you that there ought to be more consequences for scientists willingly spreading bad science though, beyond what there is now--but the solution won't be simple.
Given the vagueness of your post I'm not sure why you have the perspective that scientists produced a "non-stop wave of bullshit". From my perspective, I saw a bunch of demagogues and populists cynically manipulating a major demographic for personal gain while sidelining and ignoring the broader scientific advice and recommendations in the country the entire time, while over 350000 people died.
That will lead to one of two things: (1) information paralysis, where no-one authoritative is willing to speak in public for fear of making a mistake (and so the public sphere is ceded to the ignorant); or (2) constant churn, where experts are constantly removed from the public sphere (because everyone makes mistakes), and so we only hear from the people who haven't yet had enough experience to make a mistake.
A big part of the problem here is selective media reporting of science. All fields have good practitioners and bad practitioners. ("bad" here can mean overconfident or bad at stats or outright fraudulent) As the parent article points out, in fields where objective feedback is less easily accessible, it becomes easier and easier for bad practitioners to survive. Many media sources will report only the opinions of scientists that support the positions they agree with. And the fields with the least objective feedback are often the very same fields that the media has strong opinions about, meaning that they can easily find somebody supporting their position. Even well-intentioned media sources can have difficulty with mistranslating the results or misinterpreting the confidence level of some piece of research.
I think the reason I have a more positive opinion is because I more often tend to look at primary sources: papers, or at least blog posts by researchers. That kind of stuff is often linked on HN, which is a big part of the value of this place. Looking at primary sources makes it harder to tell what's important, and what's just minor details, but the advantage is it allows you to see more of what's actually going on, instead of just getting the media's view of "the scientific consensus". Of course you still have to watch out for the replication crisis and all that, but it's easier to tell if the scientists did their stats right when reading their paper than to try and guess based on a journalist's write up of the results.
I guess the problem I have with your "permanent cancellation" proposal is that it doesn't allow for uncertainty. Have a groups of people try to predict the outcome of 7 coin flips in a row, and less than 1 percent will remain, along with maybe Persi Diaconis. You need to have some way for people to say "there's a 50% chance of heads", without getting fired. I agree that we should still keep track of people's predictions, and stop listening to them when they've been confident and wrong many times. That kind of "prediction checkup" is important, and I wish that it was more mainstream to publish checkups of that kind. Expecting people to keep track in their heads means that most of them won't bother, and will end up listening to the same doofuses over and over.
Perhaps their opinion on that one matter they corrected was redeemed, but their general lack of understanding about the limits of their own knowledge was exposed, which is more damning for someone called an "expert."
The Swedish epidemiological team? The state of Florida epidemiological team?
Both regions of whom had better outcome per capita with less Covid restrictions than numerous states who followed the mainstream 'experts' advice.
How do you measure 'got it right'?
I believe that there is a lot of noise in the numbers, and a large numbers of causal factors. Florida or Sweden could easily be random outliers, or that the actual reasons could not be due to the cause and effect you are using as an “explanation”.
I felt not only well-informed, I actually felt and still feel a bit over-informed about the topic. My country of residence handles the crisis relatively well, so it's kind of silly and depressing to me to continue to collect data and look at daily Covid figures.
May I ask where you live? Maybe the US? Did you get your information mostly from print media, online media, or TV?
The Swedish epidemiological team? The state of Florida epidemiological team?
Both regions of whom had better outcome per capita with less Covid restrictions than numerous states who followed the mainstream 'experts' advice.
The experts were clearly lying about masks at the beginning of the pandemic as well. That doesn't give you pause in trusting them?
Are you even looking at dissenting experts opinions? Following a single group of experts is not enough to get a reliable measure.
How do you even define correctness in this case?
How'd you guess? :)
There is one complaint I had about experts in Europe, too, and that is that they resorted to a "king's lie" about masks at the beginning of the pandemic. Certainly none of them said you shouldn't wear a mask, but they downplayed their importance when there weren't enough of them yet for the medical staff. IMHO, they shouldn't have done that. Instead, governments should have regulated mask trade and distribution from the start like in some Asian countries.
It speaks volumes that you identified what country I'm from and the person I was really talking about just from a vague rant about "scientists."
My rant may have been aimed at one or two people who appear to be compulsive liars at this point, but the author of the post is complaining about a problem with science in general. And it's not something you can attribute to anti-intellectualism or the perception of science; it really is a 'dereliction of duty" on behalf of scientists, and the madness of 2020 exposed these problems to the general public. More on that problem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7leWXMr3ayk
As an aside, I would ask those people (not you) who blamed me for feeling this way if they really think browbeating people who speak out will fix the issue. Why do we all have to keep blaming each other? Why not work together to hold our experts to a higher standard?
I was here the entire crisis (and I'm not a US citizen btw) and had easy access to the same advice Canadians, Europeans, and whoever else in the West got as well. The information was here, but the political leaders often downplayed it or simply refused to follow it. What did we get? The numbers don't lie, and take a look at the results of the current political climate and the death count. This wasn't a "good way to go" being overly skeptical of scientists. Like, there are problems with science, but this is if we're being cute "throwing the baby out with the bathwater"--or if we're being less polite--so incredibly stupid it's largely contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
I'd be totally for splitting society into those who respect science and experts, and those who don't. I have no desire to live in your world.
What of those of us who respect science, but have less respect for experts? I strongly believe in science, and believe it to be humanity's "candle in the dark". I have little respect for individual experts who insist that their advice must be followed by all those they deem to be lesser than them, whether science is their justification or not.
Science as a process is the best tool we have. Scientists are human beings, and are just as flawed as everyone else. The contexts they operate in have also shown themselves to be highly susceptible influence by political trends. There was no end to the "science" that would show you the inferiority of minority races 100 years ago. You are not doing science a favor by steeping it in dogma and being blindly deferential, you're turning it into a religion.
The reality is that few even have the means to actually perform experiments. Certainly outside of computer science, that is true. It's unfortunate that the resources we allocate as a society towards scientific pursuit is such a tiny fraction of the resources we spend as a society. But I suppose that is more a reflection on the value of science to the general population than it is to anything else.
I think bubbling society is the future. We need to aim for this. But not physical barriers, electronic. IE your phone tells you if this is a pro or anti expert cafe. Where to sit on public transport, even what path to walk.
At an extreme, ideally this time last year when experts told people to not wear masks, those who chose to not believe them would within our internal world become like an Asian country and have kept it at bay while the society around us burned. Bubbles don't interact at all. But that's fantasy with the current structure.
That said, although I don't want to associate with people who believe in experts, but I also know the alternative might not be better, I would lose a lot of friends. Bubbling will make people chose between ideals and reality.
I do agree to the physical separation you talked about, but it's simply not possible. Seasteading costs are so high you/I won't be able to pick our friends.
I do think the way forward is intermixed lives where we could share roads for instance but never connect. I think that's possible in the future. But as yet we can't even achieve it electronically, case in point :)
Science not as a search for knowledge, but as a search for daddy figures to respect and obey. Nothing is as harmful to progress as this blind devotion to expertise.
Working together and benefiting from each others hard work is not an innate right. It's a right bestowed by joining into a particular social contract, be that a national one, or a local one. You are saying to me that you will not pull your own weight. In fact worse, you will work against the common good. Thus I do not want to work together with you.
The Swedish epidemiological team? The state of Florida epidemiological team?
Both of whom had better outcome per capita with less Covid restrictions than numerous states who followed the prevailing 'experts' advice.
Why only experts? Would other people be allowed to publicly say wrong things?
> Do you have it in you to ignore 800 epidemiologists, and is it actually good idea?
Yes, I do, because I was tracking the wave of non-stop bullshit coming from scientists closely throughout all of 2020, and got completely fed up. But I'm not the norm (yet), and no, it's not actually a good solution.
We're in the beginning of the story of the boy who cried wolf. Eventually the whole town ended up like me: fully willing to ignore and oppose the mainstream information channels. When a real wolf came, the boy told the truth once out of 1,000 times, and the townspeople all ignored him and got their sheep eaten up. We need to find a way to crowd-source our trust mechanism if "trust the experts" starts to fail.
My suggestion is that any "expert" who volunteers an opinion that later gets falsified should be canceled permanently from the public sphere, with no forgiveness. They can go on publishing in scientific journals and selling books, but their opinion should not be accepted by the general public anymore.
The other solution is to keep ignoring the boy and start watching your own sheep.