On deferring to the opinions of apparent experts

Pfhorrest

I've always generally been of the opinion that one should think for themselves wherever possible, but also be able to recognize the limits of one's own knowledge and other epistemic abilities, recognize superior knowledge and wisdom in others, and sometimes defer to the opinions of those others in matters about which one is clearly out of one's depth.

Some experiences here on these forums, however, have made me doubt that opinion, because there are some people who seem far more knowledgeable than me in some areas, and yet clearly and completely wrong in other areas, but claim that their position in the latter areas can be justified by things I just don't understand in the former areas. And I'm not sure how to handle that.

I don't want to call out anyone in particular, so I'm going to make up an absurd example that I hope doesn't actually describe anybody here. Say you have someone who thinks that straight white cis men are objectively superior to people of other races, sexes, genders, and orientations. (I'm hoping this is something we can all agree is a clearly and completely wrong opinion). But that same person is also obviously far more knowledgeable than you in some very technical field, like say mathematics. (I really don't want to use mathematics for this example, but I can't think of anything else that's as obviously intimidating and technical to the average person without a deep education in it).

You might be inclined to say "ok well this person is smarter than me at math, but that doesn't make them right about race/sex/etc!" Except this person says that math stuff proves their opinions about race/sex/etc. And they give you a complicated argument involving lots of math that you can't really follow, that concludes that straight white cis men are objectively superior to people of other races, sexes, genders, and orientations. I have no idea what such an argument would look like, but that's kind of the point here: imagine someone puts forth some argument connecting something you have no legs to stand on in an argument about to something you're really sure is wrong and cannot possibly be justified by this other thing you don't understand.

I'm sure lots of users here have experience with being on the other side of this kind of argument: some clueless newb has an obviously wrong opinion, and you've got a bunch of math or science or whatever to show why it's wrong, but they're not equipped to engage with your technical argument conclusively disproving them, so they've basically got to either dismiss you as spewing obscurantist nonsense as a smokescreen for your obviously false opinion, or else take you at your word on faith.

I'm used to being on that side of such arguments, the person with all the technical underpinnings I can use to show why someone else is wrong. But here I'm for the first time in my life running into some people who are obviously wrong about some things, but also obviously more knowledgeable than me about other things, who claim the obscure stuff I can't follow underlies the stuff I'm sure they're wrong about. And I'm not sure, generally speaking, on philosophical grounds, whether my impulse to dismiss them as spewing obscurantist nonsense is really a better response than just blindly taking their word on faith. I'm curious to know what other people here think about such things, on general principle.

RegularGuy

↪Pfhorrest

Some here do actually use their extensive knowledge of mathematics to argue about things that are not in its purview. They wrongly think that axiomatic thinking (deductive reasoning) is the only path to knowledge, seemingly not realizing that the axioms they rely on could never have been arrived at through deduction. See the problem here?

alcontali

Except this person says that math stuff proves their opinions about race/sex/etc. — Pfhorrest

That is a serious mismatch.

Mathematics is exclusively about abstract, Platonic worlds while race/sex is a real-world phenomenon. There is no mathematical proof for any proposition about the physical universe.

There is still science, which can deal with some real-world problems, but that drags the problem of experimental testing into the fray. So, how exactly did this person test his views on race/sex?

Pfhorrest

I intentionally picked two things that seem like a huge mismatch to me, because when I encounter this phenonemon in person the field of the premises and the field of the conclusions seem just as mismatched to me, and I'm not able to follow the supposed connection between them. So if you can't see the connection between these two things, that's great. Pretend someone who you recognize as far more knowledgeable than you about math says that there is such a connection. You can't see how, you can't understand their argument, the inference seems obviously impossible, but they also seem obviously more knowledgeable than you. How do you handle that?

Brett

↪Pfhorrest

I’ve had this many times, to the point where I begin to wonder if I’m making any sense at all. I’m never that positive I’m right anyway, but if someone isn’t really interested in helping me understand what they’re saying then I let things go. I’m not here to do battle but to try to work out a few thoughts I have.

TheWillowOfDarkness

The sort of example you are talking about there is easily refuted because it ignores the self-definition of a discipline. Math, for example, cannot be used to prove the superiority of straight white men because it’s an entirely different topic. It’s not like an empirical proof, where there is a self relation between what has appeared in experience and the empirical manifestation of the proposed state. Nor is it like a mathematical proof, in which there is some initial mathematical proposal which is then shown to be contained within a certain set of mathematical operators.

In the example you give, all you have is someone making associations between different concepts and what we must think. It’s a version of Divine Command, if God says X (the mathematical relationship performed), then Y (the superiority of straight white men) must obtain. This is just an association or correlation between two different concepts (the math and the notion straight white men are superior).

In Sartre’s terms, it’s a bad faith position. Like when someone says, “Well X told me to do it, so I had no choice” or “I can only do Y because I’m a human” or “I can only be polite to the customer, for I am a waiter."

Or similar to certain accounts of sex and gender, which claim the presence of a bodily trait entails someone must only ever belong to one category or another.

Or to use a mathematical example, an instance in which someone equivocates two distinct sets as a single set. I draw these comparison to show how cross discipline “evidence” or “proof” look like, by picking out some kind of similarity in the meanings of the two disciplines to describe something.

Deductive proofs, as such, are not really a thing in this context. They only ever repeat the initial rule (including whatever prejudices and errors they entail), an exercise in just affirming what you have already claimed or, in many cases, demanded. In terms of accounting for what and when something is known, they don’t really have a place. When we are at the place of reflecting on how we know what know, we are dealing with what we understand in any case. Any sort of deductive relation only comes after this, when we know a deductive rule and the things it applies between.

alcontali

How do you handle that? — Pfhorrest

A conclusion in mathematics must be about an abstraction that does not exist (in the physical universe). That makes it very obvious when a conclusion cannot possibly be mathematics, as he ends up saying things about the real world. There is no need to find a flaw in his proof, or verify any of his formalisms, because such outcome is already impossible.

god must be atheist

Death to logic I can't understand!

In my opinion to understand philosophical arguments you do not need math or a proof by symbolic logic. It helps, once in a while, but philosophical concepts, the ones I've encountered, are relatively and absolutely simple. The answers to questions are simple. I have yet to encounter a philosophical question or concept that needed an overly complex (beyond say, grade 7 math or grade 9 debate class) explanation or answer.

The questions of philosophy are straightforward and simple; there is no need to convolute them.

If you study Wittgenstein, Kant, Russell, and the other newfangled philosophers, you'll realize what I am talking about. There is no book on philosophy that presents incomprehensible, or hard-to-understand ideas; there are just books that present the ideas in a fashion that is hard to understand.

So PfHorrest, I am on the opinion that if common sense does not make ends meet in a proof or in an argument,then no amount of math or symbolic logic would, either.

god must be atheist

What's cis white men? White men with cysts, misspelled? I wonder why you needed to use an obscure abreviation. I hate abreviations w.a.p.

PFHorrest, you never use incomprehensible, obscure abbreviation, so why, how, and when did this cis crop op? I have absolutely no clue what it stands for. And that bugs the shit out of me. A two-second saving of typing the world out you instead banished me into a fury of anger and resentment.

Pfhorrest

↪god must be atheist

"Cis" is short for "cisgender", the opposite of "transgender".

"Cis" and "trans" are generally Latin prefixes meaning "on the same side as" and "across from", that can be found in many sciences etc.

alcontali

If you study Wittgenstein, Kant, Russell, and the other newfangled philosophers, you'll realize what I am talking about. — god must be atheist

Not so sure about Bertrand Russell. This following is an excerpt from Principia Mathematica (PM):

Put (fa) ./! (fa%x) . =. : (<f>) ./ ! {(y) .<£!(£, y), x] : (<f>) ./! {(ay) . </> ! (z, y), x],
where/! {(y) . <f> ! (z, y), x) is constructed as follows: wherever, in/! {<£ ! z, x},
a value of <j>, say <f> I a, occurs, substitute (y) . <£ ! (a, y), and develop by the
definitions at the 'beginning of #8. / ! {(ay) . <f> I (z, y), x] is similarly con-
structed. — Is Bertrand Russell readable?

The entire book is like that. I wonder how many people have read it?

In fact, I don't think that PM is nowadays still interesting enough for anybody to put in that kind of effort into something that ultimately turned out to be a failed enterprise ...

god must be atheist

I have never. Homophobic, yes. Cisgender? It has come to that?

Trans actually does not mean across from; it means "transiting" or "having transited". Maybe in Latin it means that, but in modern English it does not.

If it meant "across from" then all women would be transgender males and vice versa.

Transpose is an action of removing and placing somewhere else. Again, it's a transition, not simply being across.

Transatlantic means "moving across the Atlantic", not simply "On the other side of the Atlantic".

Transfiguration, ditto.

Transaction, ditto.

ETC.

Cis may mean stationary, then?

god must be atheist

PM — alcontali

What's PM?

Again, unnecessary and irritating, vexing fucking fuckhing fucckihhing abbreviations.

Shit this fuck.

I know: post-menstrual.

Preparation Meningitis.

Principle of Mathematics? That would be PoM.

Puckering Asshole (M mistaken for A).

Physically Muscular.

Post Meridian.

Perpetrated Mainstreamism.

fdrake

A heuristic I'd follow is about domain expertise. If someone establishes that they are to be trusted about some topic, that need not be transferred to some other topic or about the relationship of the other topic to the original topic. If someone says absolute howlers about some topic, says they are entailed by their trusted knowledge of some other topic, certainly don't transfer trust.

An unfortunate thing there is that unless you know some amount about a domain, it is difficult to verify whether someone is competent in that domain. With "real life" experts you can rely somewhat on verifying credentials, on the internet you mostly just have their word to go on.

Specifically with math and science on here, if someone says (item in math or science topic X) entails (item in philosophy topic Y), and the explanation/support of the entailment consists of natural language with vague statements regarding every day objects, pre-theoretical intuitions, and things which look incredibly difficult to formalise, I just assume that the person doesn't know what they're talking about in at least one of the topics. I'll double down on this intuition if the person ends up explaining in a loop or going off topic when pressed on the connection.

Some examples:

Popular forum one: (measurement problem in quantum mechanics) entails (subjective idealism) because "observer" dependence.

Another enduring forum one: (special relativity "paradoxes" of intuition) entails (physics is wrong).

Final (somewhat less) popular forum one: (Popper's falsification criterion) entails (anthropology and linguistics are not sciences).

Popular academic one:

(game theory model of rational agents) entails (real markets are a perfect solution to good distribution) - the social scientists/anthropologists/historians and economists with an empirical focus have been protesting for years, the theory keeps on going.

In this scenario, when someone who is good in the first domain, the one which is fed into the entailment first, they will distort the second domain in accordance with their perspective of the first. If someone is a domain expert/domain competent they should generally be able to throw some literature your way devoted the entailment (the domain connection) if it is indeed as obvious as it is portrayed.

It is possible to be knowledgeable about both domains and mostly conjectural about the domain connection between them. In my view, posts in this situation can make for interesting reads, especially when they can provide you with references, and acknowledge the speculative nature of the relationship gracefully. I learned a lot from @apokrisis by chewing on their leg in this manner.

Pfhorrest

I have never. Homophobic, yes. Cisgender? It has come to that? — god must be atheist

I'm not sure what you're saying here. "Cisgender" is to "transgender" as "heterosexual" is to "homosexual". What's the problem?

Trans actually does not mean across from; it means "transiting" or "having transited". — god must be atheist

It can mean both:

Across, through, over, beyond, to or on the other side of, outside of. — https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trans-#English

If it meant "across from" then all women would be transgender males and vice versa. — god must be atheist

The thing that's being crossed or not is the assignment of gender at birth and present gender identity. Someone who identifies on the same side of the gender spectrum that they were assigned to at birth is cisgender, someone who identifies on the other side of it is transgender.

What's PM? — god must be atheist

This following an excerpt from Principia Mathematica (PM): — alcontali

alcontali

What's PM? — god must be atheist

This following is an excerpt from Principia Mathematica (PM) — alcontali

I tried to spare myself from typing the entire title of his book again, "Principia Mathematica", by tagging it with an abbreviation, but it clearly failed! ;-)

Still, I just wanted to say that this otherwise famous book is unreadable, and even worse, not even worth reading, because Russell's views on the subject have turned out to be faulty.

god must be atheist

↪alcontali

About Russell: it's math, he is proving math with logic. That is not conceptualizing or conceptualization of philosophical ideas. It is a proof of a highly complex yet only logical system, of math. Failed or not. I don't think the answer to "is there a god" comparable to proving second degree five-unknown sets of differential equations with N degree of freedom.

And to my satisfaction, it was first Russell who answered the "is there a god or not" question. It took two or three easily understood, simple sentences.

god must be atheist

The thing that's being crossed or not is the assignment of gender at birth and present gender identity. Someone who identifies on the same side of the gender spectrum that they were assigned to at birth is cisgender, someone who identifies on the other side of it is transgender. — Pfhorrest

This is clear. Was from the outset after it was explained to me by PFHorrest what PFHorrest thought cis meant.

god must be atheist

This following an excerpt from Principia Mathematica (PM):
— alcontali — Pfhorrest

I missed that. My apologies.

It came too soon after cis. I was already possed off.

Pfhorrest

About Russell: it's math, he is proving math with logic. That is not conceptualizing or conceptualization of philosophical ideas. It is a proof of a highly complex yet only logical system, of math. Failed or not. I don't think the answer to "is there a god" comparable to proving second degree five-unknown sets of differential equations with N degree of freedom.

And to my satisfaction, it was first Russell who answered the "is there a god or not" question. It took two or three easily understood, simple sentences. — god must be atheist

Now suppose that Russell, who you probably trust to be a lot better at you than math, claimed that he could mathematically prove, with math too complex for you to follow, an answer to that "is there a god or not" question, an answer that you're very confident, for other reasons, is the wrong one.

Do you dismiss Russell's incomprehensible argument as obscurantist nonsense, or accept the conclusion of his complex technical argument you're not smart enough to follow just on his word?

alcontali

I don't think the answer to "is there a god" comparable to proving second degree five-unknown sets of differential equations with N degree of freedom. — god must be atheist

"Is there a god" is a question about an axiom. You should rather compare it to :

The naturals are assumed to be closed under a single-valued "successor" function S. For every natural number n, S(n) is a natural number. — Peano's 6th axiom of number theory

In both cases, we do not seek to prove such starting-point belief. It is just a system-wide premise in a particular theory. It is just a belief, take it or leave it. Furthermore, it is only meaningful to believe that, if you want to use the formal system built on top of such starting-point belief. Otherwise, build something on top of another belief.

By the way, there are lots of different number theories with other choices for the axioms. Dedekind-Peano (PA) is merely the most popular one ..

god must be atheist

Now suppose that Russell, who you probably trust to be a lot better at you than math, claimed that he could mathematically prove, with math too complex to follow, an answer to that "is there a god or not" question, an answer that you're very confident, for other reasons, is the wrong one.

Do you dismiss Russell's incomprehensible argument as obscurantist nonsense, or accept the conclusion of his complex technical argument you're not smart enough to follow just on his word? — Pfhorrest

Yes, I dismiss his math / logic proof.

If it does not make sense to a reasonable mind, then no amount of math or obscure symbolic logic will convince me.

This has already been demonstrated in the "red" example, where only an empty set can satisfy the two manifestations at the same time and in the same respect, "everything is red in this box and everything is non-red in this box".

A simple, intuitive thought is worth to me more than ten pages of stuff I don't understand.

god must be atheist

"Is there a god" is a question about an axiom. — alcontali

No, this is an empirical question, not an axiomatic question. You are on that opinion only because to you god is the alpha and the omega. To me god may be anything, but we don't know anything about it, even that it exists or not; any claim of any quality of a god, including its existence, is a matter of faith without any evidence. In other words, no authority exists on god's qualities, and if someone claims to be one such authority, he or she is badly mistaken or lying through his or her teeth.

jjAmEs

You might be inclined to say "ok well this person is smarter than me at math, but that doesn't make them right about race/sex/etc!" Except this person says that math stuff proves their opinions about race/sex/etc. And they give you a complicated argument involving lots of math that you can't really follow, that concludes that straight white cis men are objectively superior to people of other races, sexes, genders, and orientations. — Pfhorrest

First thing that occurs to me is that philosophy is appealing partly because it helps with just this kind of situation. I first liked it as a kind of super-science of authority. What's good? What's true? Pretty soon it's what if anything gives a person the right to answer those questions authoritatively?

In this situation, I'd attack the phrase 'objectively superior.' Isn't superior a value judgment? If one defines superiority in terms of terms of a statistic, then of course a case can be made (if one chooses just the right statistic) that this or that group is 'superior.' But if we generalize this and include other arbitrary and perhaps fuzzier metrics, then much of what humans do is make cases for the superiority of this or that group. Nonracists are better than racists because... The examined life is better than the unexamined life (which is not even worth living) because...

Can any system of reasons protect us individually from occasionally fearing that we may have it all wrong? Or a big piece of it wrong? Perhaps our acceptance of our mortality is even connected to an attachment to Kundera's not-so-unbearable lightness of being (less unbearable with time and jadedness.) I don't know if Democritus laughed as much as he was thought to, but the notion that it's atoms and voids beneath our passions, dreams, and violence is comforting. No one is wrong or right or confused for long. Though it's fun to be puffed up in the meantime.

alcontali

No, this is an empirical question, not an axiomatic question. — god must be atheist

It depends on the context. In religious law, it is an axiomatic belief.

In science, it may apparently look like an empirical question but the falsificationist boundaries of science do not allow for a question that cannot be tested experimentally.

If a question is scientific, then there exists paperwork that can be filled out as justification as well as a procedure to verify the paperwork. So, what should the paperwork look like and what does the verification procedure entail?

Deleted User

And I'm not sure, generally speaking, on philosophical grounds, whether my impulse to dismiss them as spewing obscurantist nonsense is really a better response than just blindly taking their word on faith. I'm curious to know what other people here think about such things, on general principle. — Pfhorrest

I don't think one can have a general principle, even for oneself. There certainly could be situations where someone's expertise in a field I do not consider relevent, actually has a strong argument that I dismiss or want to. There certainly could be situations where they are overextending themselves or just hallucinating. Smart people with or without specialized knowledge are capable of fooling themselves. That applies, therefore, to both me and them - unless my sense of myself as a smart person is an example of me fooling myself.

A few thoughts in general:
We have to use intuition in these situations.
We don't have to think in binary terms about these situations. We can remain unconvinced, for example, but notice we are not sure. There is some weird idea that is usually not uttered but seems to control people: We have to decide if an argument is right or wrong so we can put in a box. I assume it causes anxiety not to do this, but I think it would be better if humans stopped viewing things this way.
Whatever heuristic we develop for this situation is going to be terrible for some humans to follow. They may be terrible at intuition and/or introspection. They may find ideas they disagree with to threatening, in general, to even take a look at.

god must be atheist

It depends on the context. In religious law, it is an axiomatic belief. — alcontali

Whether it's a religious law or a physics experiment to establish the presence or existence of god, it is a philosophical matter. And both types of approaches give a clear, not-so-complex or -difficult, straightforward answer.

This is a demonstration that philosophical questions and problems and ideas and concerns and considerations etc are all very simple. Two, maybe three, four or five, maximum, agents to deal with in the argument. This is easy to keep in mind. Extremely complicated math as support of an incomprehensible or false theory is not going to serve an opposing debater against me.

In the "RED" (for short) example, PFHorrest, I eventually came to the same conclusion as you were trying to show me with logical transformations. I did not believe you, because I could not follow your reasoning. I still can't. Although it turns out your claim was right. But I believe you now; and not because of the "Not-not-everything is something-not-not everything else" type of transformation. I believe you now because I came to the same conclusion as per the law of the excluded middle or whatever that law is called.

You in that debate made an in-road toward my understanding your claim and to agree with you, by saying "every time machine owned by people these days are green" and "every time machine owned by people these days are not green" can only both be true if no person on Earth has a time machine. That was an in-road, because it was intuitive, it made sense, it was something I understood.

Let me put it this way. I used to belong before I was kicked out for misconduct to a society called "International Society for Philosophical Enquiry". Most of my time there was before the Internet. Our mutual club-wide correspondence occurred on a monthly magazine. Some dude published something, and a reader told the Editor about that article: "This makes no sense to me, Sir, but it must have made sense to you, since you published it." This the Editor took to heart, and admitted that he had made a mistake.

It is not good policy to agree to something you are not sure what it means. Much like it's not good policy to sign a legal document that you have no clue what it contains as far as your responsibilities and limitations of rights and benefits go by its wording.

If you are pressed, the worst you ought to allow yourself to do would be to say "This explanation is beyond my comprehension, and therefore I cannot in clear conscience accept it." Let them call you or me stupid; it's better than being a loser.

Qwex

I don't think intelligence is a human standard.

If you are intelligent, there is reward.

You don't need another human to clarify that you're intelligent; and that process is entirely unintelligent.

You become adult by the world.

Other humans can offer you aid, but it's optional.

god must be atheist

I think a lot of people are confused by the man-made league of intelligence. — Qwex

Would you say the confusion comes from a lack of enough intelligence?

Qwex

↪god must be atheist

Stupidity concerning what intelligence is.

If I need an intelligent idol, I'll appoint one - do I need one forced upon me?

god must be atheist

You don't need another human to clarify that you're intelligent; and that process is entirely unintelligent. — Qwex

So you think people are not intelligent enough to measure people's intelligence. That means, that people's intelligence is below the level of their own intelligence.

On deferring to the opinions of apparent experts

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