I know this comment was 17 years ago, but nearly half of modern US politics in 2024 is strongly influenced by the idea “don’t trust experts”. I have listened to a lot of cranks (ex), and the popular ones are quitegood at what they do, rhetorically, so most experts have little chance against them in a debate. Plus, if the topic is something important, the public was already primed to believe one side or the other by whatever media they happen to consume, and if the debate winner would otherwise seem close (to a layman) then such preconceptions will dominate perceptions about who won.
One thing these winning cranks take advantage is that the audience (like the cranks themselves!) tend to believe they are “knowledgeable enough to understand all the technical arguments” when they’re not. Also, most experts have much worse teaching skills than these cranks (who are popular for a reason) so the expert tends to provide worse explanations, while also overlooking key counterarguments they could make against the crank’s case.
So: in today’s environment, I see a large fraction of the population as giving too little credence to authority in cases where they only partially evaluate the arguments. Related SSC. Like proofs, arguments can be completely wrong due to a single flaw. A partial evaluation will not necessarily uncover the flaw, but pop cranks are often good at pointing out things that appear as flaws to the uneducated (perhaps because they have a shorter inferential distance to the audience than the experts do, but also because they have more practice in public debate). And needless to say, people who are undecided don’t know that they’re listening to a crank, and would be offended if you claimed that the one who they thought won the debate was a crank.
I know this comment was 17 years ago, but nearly half of modern US politics in 2024 is strongly influenced by the idea “don’t trust experts”. I have listened to a lot of cranks (ex), and the popular ones are quite good at what they do, rhetorically, so most experts have little chance against them in a debate. Plus, if the topic is something important, the public was already primed to believe one side or the other by whatever media they happen to consume, and if the debate winner would otherwise seem close (to a layman) then such preconceptions will dominate perceptions about who won.
One thing these winning cranks take advantage is that the audience (like the cranks themselves!) tend to believe they are “knowledgeable enough to understand all the technical arguments” when they’re not. Also, most experts have much worse teaching skills than these cranks (who are popular for a reason) so the expert tends to provide worse explanations, while also overlooking key counterarguments they could make against the crank’s case.
So: in today’s environment, I see a large fraction of the population as giving too little credence to authority in cases where they only partially evaluate the arguments. Related SSC. Like proofs, arguments can be completely wrong due to a single flaw. A partial evaluation will not necessarily uncover the flaw, but pop cranks are often good at pointing out things that appear as flaws to the uneducated (perhaps because they have a shorter inferential distance to the audience than the experts do, but also because they have more practice in public debate). And needless to say, people who are undecided don’t know that they’re listening to a crank, and would be offended if you claimed that the one who they thought won the debate was a crank.