You hit the nail on the head for the conservative agenda, though that is not as impressive as it once was since they all have started saying the quiet parts out loud. Anyone with enough brain cells in close contact to notice that Jesus was about as anticapitalist as you could possibly get is appalled and concerned for their safety. At least all of the ones I know are.

To your point on the authority of a postdoctoral level person who assumes they are right in hubris, I feel like they have kinda earned it. It is also likely that their “wrong” is going to be far closer to right than that of a lay. I am personally a polymath, so I don’t find lay topics for myself very often, but when I do, I do listen to topical experts and respect what they say, while checking the voracity of things that feel off to me using reputable journals and prepublication articles on the likes of arXiv.

If someone is lay and they are either unable of unwilling to do the diligence to verify the person claiming topical authority, then they really need to just take what is said at face value and not enter the more global conversation aside from trying to learn more (eg asking questions). I am so tired of my numbskull uncle claiming that Anthony Faucci doesn’t know how viruses work of some distant relation bitching about how student loan forgiveness is theft from taxpayers. My uncle knows nothing about virology and my distant relation couldn’t parse economic principles to save his life, but there they sit, acting as counter-authorities to people with doctorates and 40+ years of professional experience. That is the part I want to see stop. If you have a Masters degree, fine, argue with the expert, but if you have never stepped foot inside a classroom where that topic was being taught, just don’t. Your opinion is woefully uninformed and thus not worth the CO2 you expended to voice it.

I do like your take on the societal and philosophical underpinnings for the Death of Expertise. It gels well with some things and gives me some avenues to investigate should I finally get fed up with this world enough to write it. Until that time, I will just keep Farnsworthing it.

Damn it… I literally just found draw.io like 2 weeks ago.

Fair enough argument. I do wonder who, in your opinion, is someone who can justifiably have authority on a topic if not a topic expert? Who is reasonable to be educated by?

As for the book, at this point I have not put pen to paper as it were, but the premise is the observation that there is a concerted effort on the part of some political parties to sew so much doubt in subject experts as to render their knowledge meaningless to the general populace and how dangerous that becomes when the situation is something that has potentially dire consequences. I have seen it happening for a long time, but it really came to a head for me in 2020 when I saw entirely lay politicians and pundits undermining warnings from virologists, epidemiologists, and statististians and sewing distrust in public health organizations essentially to trade people’s lives for political points. Since then I have been seeing an ever escalating trend for people in category 1 of authority to push the populace away from category 3 on topics which really only category 3 should be talking at all. The rest of us should be shutting up and taking notes, asking questions for clarification, and learning.

Abortion, gender identity, climate change, economics geopolitics, etc. Essentially every topic that has been politicized into a hot button issue is really somerhing that is so beyond complex that we should not be arguing with the people who have dedicated their entire adult lives, sometimes 40+ years, to studying.

My father has the perfect microcosm anecdote from his working days. He worked for a garage door manufacturer who hired some fresh faced MBAs into middle management. They were all sitting in a meeting one day and thought they came up with an amazing idea, so they took it to the veteran engineers who had been designing garage door openers for decades, some of them essentially since the damn things were invented, and told them to make their hairbrained idea. The enginners looked over what they were given and told them that they had had the idea decades earlier and that it did not work and that materials science and engineering had not progressed to the point that it would be feasible. Did the MBAs who were trying to make waves and make a name for themselves listen? Nope, they fired all of the veteran engineers and hired in a bunch of fresh faced engineers who had never actually designed a garage door opener and told them to build their hairbrained idea. The engineers, only knowing what they had learned in school and a couple of years in other jobs got excited by this revolutionary idea and dove into it. Fast forward about 2 years, and millions in R&D, and we find the fresh faced engineers, now not so fresh, somberly telling the MBA dickheads exactly what the veteran engineers had told them initially. This, along with a few other boneheaded schemes to make earnings sheets look better for the MBAs actually ended up tanking the company and it was sold like 10 years later.

Subject expertise matters. Respecting subject expertise matters. Being able to recognize when you are sitting atop Mount DK is one of the finest skills we could ever teach our children.

Even with the somewhat incorrect examples, I want to print this out and hang it as a poster on my wall.

I have to respectfully disagreed with your example. Ostensibly the researcher should be an authority. I think the example given in the chart is not quite right either. I think the confusion comes from the three definitions of “Authority”.

1. the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience. “he had absolute authority over his subordinates”

2. a person or organization having power or control in a particular, typically political or administrative, sphere. “the health authorities”

3. the power to influence others, especially because of one’s commanding manner or one’s recognized knowledge about something.

In your example the “Authority” is definition 3, someone with specialized knowledge of a topic that should be listened to by those who are lay on the topic.

In the chart I think they were trying to go for 1, which is the correct source of Authority Bias, but they didn’t want to step on toes or get political. The actual example is someone who has decision authority like a police officer or politician or a boss at a workplace who says things and a listener automatically believes them regardless of the speakers actual specialized knowledge of the topic they are speaking on. A better example would be “Believing a vaccine is dangerous because a politician says it is.”

This all feeds into a topic I have been kicking around in my head for a while that I have been contemplating attempting to write up as a book. “The Death of Expertise”. So many people have been so brainwashed that authorities in definition 3 are met with a frankly asinine amount of incredulity, but authorities in the first are trusted regardless of education or demonstrable specialized knowledge.

I forget the exact quote or who said it, but the gist is that a species cannot be considered sapient (intelligent) on an interplanetary/interstellar stage until they have discovered Calculus. I prefer to use that as my bar for the sapience of those around me as well.

This is a cultural thing. My wife has studdied German culture, particularly relating to their relationship with their language, pretty extensively and from what she says they are exceedingly resistant to changes to their general language at all. Hence all of the compound nouns for new devices instead of coming up with a new word. Apparently the cultural adoption of “Das handy” for cellphone was a cultural milestone since they actually used something new instead of trying to cram together “Mobile Wireless Vocal Communication Device” into one word.

I hace been using noscript for like 15 years now. In my experience, it comes down to recognizing what is a required and superfluous or privacy invading 3rd party. Some websites can take me a while to get working, but I have had very few which I cannot figure out.

You assume that the governments of which you speak are not assisting intentionally. These companies did not write the EULA legal frameworks that allow them virtual carte blanch to take and do whatever they want just because the population is trapped in the endless cycle of coercion that is our life.

Why do all of these companies decide they are so tired of existing?

Yup. I shop at Walmart out of desperation. I had stopped entirely for years after hearing that they have members of staff who go around from store to store to help get employees on food stamps. That and that they tell manufacturers what the price will be. That is not how commerce works.

My solution to the government assistance issue is a pretty straightforward answer. Revise corporate tax codes to include a reduction exempt line item that totals 2x the total value of all government assistance received by employees. Do not pass go, give us your $200. Food stamps exist to help families who are struggling, not as a corporate subsidy.

Good not-a-bot. Thanks for the updated info. Bookmarking it for when I get into arguments about how the moves Amazon is making towards fully automated fulfilment canters is a death knell for the economy or why I refuse to use self checkout.

The word you are looking for is “Oligopoly”

• a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers.

And yes, they should. Our laws focus on Monopolies, but the big boys figured out a long time ago that if they let a single major competitor exist that the government cannot really touch them. This is why Target and Costco exist and Walmart does not do everything in their power to stomp them out.

This is why I use a script blocker to block the scripts from marketing domains. From what I have been able to see the cookies aren’t written because the code that writes it is not allowed to execute. It also stops script injections and other malware payloads that require extra-domain linkages to scripts.

Plus all the political stuff. The man is patantly off his rocker.

That is actually intentional. They do it to restrict refunds on Steam and consoles.

Incompetence might even be a little harsh. Inexperience or incompetence maybe. I prefer inexperience.

Your estimate seems a few orders of magnitude low. I once had an Econ 101 professor who said she recognized that I should think about going into marketing as I would be good at it. I responded “Nah, I prefer my soul right where it is.” Little did she know it was already on the short bus headed for hell as I am agnostic and will enjoy the conversation with other righteous nonbelievers.

Aside from 3 you are essentially creating Stumble Upon.

Both.