The problem I have with statements like these is they focus on the misses while ignoring hits.

Expert consensus says that washing hands prevents the spread of disease. It's been like that since the 1950s. Has that consensus been wrong?

What about the expert consensus that azithromycin is an effective treatment against (most strains of) streptococcus? Is that consensus wrong?

You are correct, expert consensus will be wrong at times and it will take a fairly large push and evidence to change course. However, for every example of the experts "getting it wrong" there are 100s if not 1000s where you are better off following the consensus. Further, as time goes on, the process of developing consensus improves itself. It looks for faults that lead to bad conclusions and corrects for those faults in future studies.

It is a truth that experts and their consensuses will be wrong. However, if I follow and accept what a strong expert consensus says about something in that field of study 99% or even 99.99% of the time, they will be right. Or said another way, if you make the claim that "This expert consensus is wrong" You'll be right 0.01% of the time and wrong 99.99% of the time. Unless you are an expert in that field of study and you have a bunch of very strong research backing the claim, you've got no footing to really go against the consensus.

I agree that expert consensus is more often right than wrong. However you have no scientific basis for claiming that they are right 99% of the time. You just made up that number. In fact the actual accuracy rate is unknown, and indeed unknowable.

My subjective impression is that expert accuracy rates vary widely by scientific field. High energy particle physicists might actually be hitting 99.99%. Psychologists and nutritionists might not even be at 50%. Epidemiologists are somewhere in the middle.

Experts lose credibility when they make sweeping recommendations based on flawed or limited research rather than remaining silent as they should. Once trust is lost it takes a generation to regain.

> However you have no scientific basis for claiming that they are right 99% of the time. You just made up that number. In fact the actual accuracy rate is unknown, and indeed unknowable.

> My subjective impression is that expert accuracy rates vary widely by scientific field. High energy particle physicists might actually be hitting 99.99%. Psychologists and nutritionists might not even be at 50%. Epidemiologists are somewhere in the middle.

All fair points that I don't really disagree with.

> Experts lose credibility when they make sweeping recommendations based on flawed or limited research rather than remaining silent as they should. Once trust is lost it takes a generation to regain.

I don't think it's quiet as binary. I agree, they should limit recommendations based on the data and be very open when "the data is limited and more information could change our recommendation".

But I don't think that means they need to be silent when data is limited, just careful with communication.

Health experts are in the worst position for this sort of thing. In a pandemic situation, data will simply be limited and action required to prevent lose of life. You can't just sit back and do nothing.

But, I'd agree that you need to be very open and frank about why you are taking actions and how confident you are that the actions you are taking will be effective. COVID hasn't been handled perfectly in that regard, but it could be worse.

As for trust and credibility, I think a major social issue we have is that we are quick to distrust experts over being wrong or mistepping on any given issue but for some reason we are extremely forgiving of religious leaders and politicians that repeat platitudes we agree with. I'm not advocating for blind trust in experts, but I wish it wasn't so reactionary, where any wrong statement causes people to lose all trust in expert credibility. That's not something I could control anyways.

Actually action is not required. In the medical field if you aren't legitimately confident about the effects of a particular action, both positive and negative, then it's better to sit back and do nothing (while conducting additional research).

"First, do no harm" is a fundamental principle of medical ethics. Unfortunately iatrogenic harm from over treatment is still a serious cause of injuries and deaths. The default should always be to do nothing unless there is clear and reliable evidence to support intervention. That applies equally to pandemics as to other situations.

https://www.nap.edu/catalog/9728/to-err-is-human-building-a-...

I understand that politicians might sometimes have to take rapid actions based on political factors. But don't deceive the populace by falsely claiming those actions are supported by scientific consensus.

given that knowledge is practically infinite (bounded only by the expanse of the universe), you'd actually expect the correctness of scientific consensus to asymptotically approach 0. that is, we're waaaaaay more wrong than right, and waaaaay more often, before we get it right, especially as knowledge gets more fractally intricate and expansive.

That'd only be true if expert consensus covered all knowledge. It doesn't, nor does it opine on all possible knowledge.

Saying correctness approaches 0 because knowledge is effectively infinite would be like saying our ability to do math correctly is 0 because there are an infinite amount of numbers. Or, that our ability to write correct software is 0 because there are infinite possible programs.

no, those are not analogous at all. knowability is literally a subset of all knowledge, which pushes into a void that expands faster than we can enumerate. it's hubris to think otherwise.

> you'd actually expect the correctness of scientific consensus to asymptotically approach 0

Scientific consensus correctness is calculated as true assertions / all assertions.

If we stopped making assertions, today, the scientific consensus correctness would be fixed at whatever level it is at. The amount of knowledge that hasn't been studied has no bearing on the correctness of scientific consensus. That's a number that is finite with a denominator squarely fixed by the number of assertions that happen as human knowledge expands.

The assertion 1 + 1 = 2 will always be true. If that was the only assertion the scientific community ever made and had consensus over then they'd be at 100% correctness. It doesn't matter that you can also calculate 1 + 2, or 3 + 5, or an infinite number of numerical combinations. The denominator is the assertions, not the unasserted assertions. It doesn't matter that knowledge is "fractile" or whatever. Because, assertions by the scientific community are pretty much always couched as "Given the current data, this model fits best". Newtonian physics isn't "incorrect" it's incomplete. This is the same for most knowledge with that "fractile" understanding.

The only way you approach 0 is if our fundamental understanding of reality is completely fundamentally flawed, but then, that'd be an unknowable knowledge.

that's trying to artificially constrain knowledge in a way so that your prior assertion is true (reminiscent of the incompleteness theorem). that's a common way that people become simultaneously self-certain and wrong.

scientific consensus has no hope of outrunning even what humans in general know, let alone every scientific conjecture ever made, most of which aren't disproven, but rather merely discarded. and all that is a tiny speck next to everything that's within reach of human knowledge, which is miniscule next to everything that could ever be known but is forever beyond our reach. it really does approach 0 at the limit.

I'm not "constraining knowledge" I'm not saying it isn't theoretically infinite. I'm saying that the amount of knowledge has no barring on whether or not an assertion is true.

Further, the scenario of this entire thread is about current and future scientific consensus, not past consensus. The fact that protoscience said that that you need to balance the 4 humors to cure illness does not affect current scientific consensus which soundly rejects that notion.

The number of assertions we have scientific consensus on is finite. The number of those assertions which are true is a finite number. The infinite nature of knowledge does not change that ratio because, again, we aren't making assertions about everything that is knowable.

The entire point of this conversation is "What is more likely true, what the experts say or something else?". You are making the claim that because scientists don't know what every atom in the sun is doing, they can't correctly say that the sun will rise in the morning. Because, their knowledge of the sun is an infinitesimally small percentage of everything there is to know about the sun.

My point is, scientists aren't making assertions about what every quark in the sun will do. They aren't making assertions about the temperature of every square inch of the sun. The assertions they are making are far more broad and, shocker, likely 90+% true. Which circles back to my main point. If an expert tells you "The surface of the sun is roughly 6000C" That's a correct statement.

If you aren't going to address this in your next comment then don't bother because I'm done with this. You are being purposefully obtuse.

> The problem I have with statements like these is they focus on the misses while ignoring hits.

That's how trust works. It only takes 1 miss to lose it.

The issue isn't that experts are wrong or change their stance when the data changes. That isn't a problem and is exactly how things should work.

The issue is when politicians and leaders treat "expert opinion" as settled truth. Our decisions and policies need to be crafted knowing that experts are wrong and the situation changes when the data changes. Instead, politicians and leaders hold up expert opinion as settled and let the blame fall on the scientists, researchers, etc. when they "miss". If their work was not co-opted by politicians there would be no issue.

> That's how trust works. It only takes 1 miss to lose it.

No, that’s only how things work when you are looking for a pretense to ignore expert advice.

How am I supposed to judge expert advice if I lack the technical knowledge? Blind trust?

What else can you do? Really? How can you trust or distrust expert advice without the technical knowledge?

Most of the reasons for distrust I've seen have basically boiled down to "I don't like what the expert is saying" or "They were wrong once, obviously all experts are wrong about everything".

It’s definitely a soft skill, but roughly for me it’s: - assumes good faith - doesn’t attempt to control others - doesn’t show disdain of their out group

Obviously knowing somebody personally makes this much easier.

“Expert consensus says that washing hands prevents the spread of disease. It's been like that since the 1950s. Has that consensus been wrong?”

WRT Covid, yes that advice was wrong and has been abandoned as Covid isn’t spread by surface transmission.