The problem is that the very fact that experts are listened to and respected creates incentives to become certified as an expert or to claim to be an expert, and that these incentives are non-truth-tracking. If you lust for fame and glory, or you want to seem original, or if you have a political agenda, or if you’re worried about what your publisher thinks will sell—all these sorts of things might help your bid to be certified as an expert or hinder it, but they’re not directly about the map that reflects the territory, and everything that’s not directly about the map that reflects the territory just adds noise to the process.
In a physical science with conclusions nailed down for decades, sure, don’t even think about questioning the consensus. But on an issue people actually care about (sorry, physics nerds, but you know what I mean), if you have a concept of epistemic rationality, and you know about Aumann agreement and updating your beliefs on other people’s beliefs as a special case of updating your beliefs on any data you get from your environment and you take all of this dead seriously, and you’ve read the existing literature, and you’ve spent many, many hours thinking about it, and you still find yourself disagreeing with the consensus—I’m not going to say you should forfeit your vision. You can’t trust the mainstream, because the mainstream is insane. The fact that you’re insane too doesn’t mean you can just trust the authorities; it means you have to lower your confidence in everything.
The problem is that the very fact that experts are listened to and respected creates incentives to become certified as an expert or to claim to be an expert, and that these incentives are non-truth-tracking. If you lust for fame and glory, or you want to seem original, or if you have a political agenda, or if you’re worried about what your publisher thinks will sell—all these sorts of things might help your bid to be certified as an expert or hinder it, but they’re not directly about the map that reflects the territory, and everything that’s not directly about the map that reflects the territory just adds noise to the process.
In a physical science with conclusions nailed down for decades, sure, don’t even think about questioning the consensus. But on an issue people actually care about (sorry, physics nerds, but you know what I mean), if you have a concept of epistemic rationality, and you know about Aumann agreement and updating your beliefs on other people’s beliefs as a special case of updating your beliefs on any data you get from your environment and you take all of this dead seriously, and you’ve read the existing literature, and you’ve spent many, many hours thinking about it, and you still find yourself disagreeing with the consensus—I’m not going to say you should forfeit your vision. You can’t trust the mainstream, because the mainstream is insane. The fact that you’re insane too doesn’t mean you can just trust the authorities; it means you have to lower your confidence in everything.
But please—don’t take my word for it!