My general heuristic is that the higher the stakes (especially for personal and societal survival), the more you need to check the expert consensus (especially for softer sciences such as medicine, sociology, and economics). Examples where expert opinion should be checked (and is or was probably wrong or misguided): cryonics, certain pandemic mitigation strategies, aging research, geoengineering. Examples where expert opinion probably shouldn’t be checked very often by non-experts: brain surgery, bridge building, rocket engineering, archeological excavation.
If you go for brain surgery, check the error rates of different doctors that might operate you and taking actions so that you get operated by a doctor with a low error rate seems to be pretty valuable. You probably also should get opinions from experts that aren’t brain surgeons about whether the surgery in itself makes sense.
Bridges build today are often more expensive, take longer to build and are more ugly than those build 70 years ago. Moses wasn’t an architect but was good at building bridges.
Elon Musk wasn’t an expert at rocket engineering before starting SpaceX. He seems to do pretty well.
I was referring to how docs do brain surgery (e.g., infection prevention procedures, what instruments are used, where incisions are made, etcetera) rather than error rates or second opinions. I highly doubt that many non-experts (even a very motivated brain cancer patient) could successfully determine the appropriateness of specific surgical techniques for brain surgery. And since brain cancer is rare, it’s low stakes from a societal or even a personal survival point of view (although, it will become high stakes if you’ll live a lot longer than the current lifespan).
Nah, bridges (see other reply) and rockets aren’t high stakes enough to be worth worrying about.
China is a big one for this. Large numbers of experts, including many non-pundits, have been widely forecasting China’s imminent demise on 3 separate occasions over the last 1.5 years (disclaimer: if you look closely you’ll see that many of them were being vague and had way too much plausible deniability to consider it a “forecast”, and I only used the word “forecast” above because many were vaguely acting like they were forecasting).
fall 2021: banking system collapse due to evergrande spring 2022: covid overruns healthcare system, causing mass graves and widespread system failure winter 2022: covid overruns healthcare system, causing mass graves and widespread system failure
To be fair, I was a little too harsh on the third time, since many people and most china watchers were very fatigued by then with the ubiquitous plausibly deniable claims of imminent catastrophe in China which didn’t come to pass at all the first two times. Then when there actually were videos popping up of piles of bodybags, everyone got confused. The first two times were pretty strong evidence that experts of all kinds were popping up all over the place making way overconfident predictions of China’s imminent demise. I don’t know whether those predictions persuaded many intelligence agencies or wall street analyst firms, but many people in open source intelligence got bamboozled and started wising up by the third time. I heard that the worst of it was on twitter (alot of respected china watchers apparently tweet), but I’ve never used or trusted twitter so I’m not the right person to ask about how bad it got there.
It’s a tricky situation. As soon as Hong Kong relaxed its pandemic strategy, excess deaths exploded. Since China followed a similar (and even stricter) pandemic strategy, it seemed inevitable that the same thing would happen (all things being equal) and millions would die with many more millions becoming hospitalized. But all things might not be equal; the circulating strains of covid in China might be less lethal than when Hong Kong relaxed its own pandemic strategy. So, it could go either way.
The real problem here is that China is playing Russian roulette; rather than using more effective vaccines and respirators, its using less effective vaccines and poorly-performing masks instead. The expert consensus seems to correctly identity the vaccine problem but still mostly ignores the mask/respirator issue, as they’ve done throughout the pandemic.
The examples you give seem to be divided more according to richness & rapidity of feedback loops, as well as ease of credit assignment rather than how impactful the work is to society. Cryonics seems about as important as bridge building. If we kept failing at bridge building, many would die.
Bridge building is nowhere near as important as cryonics (or more appropriately, “brain preservation” technology which may not involved cryonics at all), because brain preservation tech has the potential to save hundreds of millions and possibly billions of people from certain death. Even if you disagree, it is still potentially important for personal survival way more than bridge building.
My general heuristic is that the higher the stakes (especially for personal and societal survival), the more you need to check the expert consensus (especially for softer sciences such as medicine, sociology, and economics). Examples where expert opinion should be checked (and is or was probably wrong or misguided): cryonics, certain pandemic mitigation strategies, aging research, geoengineering. Examples where expert opinion probably shouldn’t be checked very often by non-experts: brain surgery, bridge building, rocket engineering, archeological excavation.
If you go for brain surgery, check the error rates of different doctors that might operate you and taking actions so that you get operated by a doctor with a low error rate seems to be pretty valuable. You probably also should get opinions from experts that aren’t brain surgeons about whether the surgery in itself makes sense.
Bridges build today are often more expensive, take longer to build and are more ugly than those build 70 years ago. Moses wasn’t an architect but was good at building bridges.
Elon Musk wasn’t an expert at rocket engineering before starting SpaceX. He seems to do pretty well.
I was referring to how docs do brain surgery (e.g., infection prevention procedures, what instruments are used, where incisions are made, etcetera) rather than error rates or second opinions. I highly doubt that many non-experts (even a very motivated brain cancer patient) could successfully determine the appropriateness of specific surgical techniques for brain surgery. And since brain cancer is rare, it’s low stakes from a societal or even a personal survival point of view (although, it will become high stakes if you’ll live a lot longer than the current lifespan).
Nah, bridges (see other reply) and rockets aren’t high stakes enough to be worth worrying about.
China is a big one for this. Large numbers of experts, including many non-pundits, have been widely forecasting China’s imminent demise on 3 separate occasions over the last 1.5 years (disclaimer: if you look closely you’ll see that many of them were being vague and had way too much plausible deniability to consider it a “forecast”, and I only used the word “forecast” above because many were vaguely acting like they were forecasting).
What kind of demise are you referring to?
fall 2021: banking system collapse due to evergrande
spring 2022: covid overruns healthcare system, causing mass graves and widespread system failure
winter 2022: covid overruns healthcare system, causing mass graves and widespread system failure
To be fair, I was a little too harsh on the third time, since many people and most china watchers were very fatigued by then with the ubiquitous plausibly deniable claims of imminent catastrophe in China which didn’t come to pass at all the first two times. Then when there actually were videos popping up of piles of bodybags, everyone got confused. The first two times were pretty strong evidence that experts of all kinds were popping up all over the place making way overconfident predictions of China’s imminent demise. I don’t know whether those predictions persuaded many intelligence agencies or wall street analyst firms, but many people in open source intelligence got bamboozled and started wising up by the third time. I heard that the worst of it was on twitter (alot of respected china watchers apparently tweet), but I’ve never used or trusted twitter so I’m not the right person to ask about how bad it got there.
It’s a tricky situation. As soon as Hong Kong relaxed its pandemic strategy, excess deaths exploded. Since China followed a similar (and even stricter) pandemic strategy, it seemed inevitable that the same thing would happen (all things being equal) and millions would die with many more millions becoming hospitalized. But all things might not be equal; the circulating strains of covid in China might be less lethal than when Hong Kong relaxed its own pandemic strategy. So, it could go either way.
The real problem here is that China is playing Russian roulette; rather than using more effective vaccines and respirators, its using less effective vaccines and poorly-performing masks instead. The expert consensus seems to correctly identity the vaccine problem but still mostly ignores the mask/respirator issue, as they’ve done throughout the pandemic.
The examples you give seem to be divided more according to richness & rapidity of feedback loops, as well as ease of credit assignment rather than how impactful the work is to society. Cryonics seems about as important as bridge building. If we kept failing at bridge building, many would die.
Bridge building is nowhere near as important as cryonics (or more appropriately, “brain preservation” technology which may not involved cryonics at all), because brain preservation tech has the potential to save hundreds of millions and possibly billions of people from certain death. Even if you disagree, it is still potentially important for personal survival way more than bridge building.