If you still decided that the head of the IMF is unfit to speak with the people you are paid a lot of money to educate, then confirmation bias comfortably feeds on your brain.
I’m not sure how strongly that holds, but it’s worth mentally noting that “The most qualified people to make policy decision D are all F’s, so anybody who is not an F should defer to any F on D” is a logical fallacy, albeit possibly strong evidence, depending on context.
For example, maybe all the most qualified experts on the existence of God(s) are philosophers. But given LW’s broad atheism, I reckon the people who upvoted your post would have a hard time accepting that a weekend atheist should defer to a theistic philosopher. Someone could start out with the basic beliefs of the head of the IMF and be polarized further in those beliefs by their studies of economics, only remembering the economic evidence favouring their position. If one thinks this happens about equally to those one agrees with and those one disagrees with, then one’s posterior ends up being the same as the prior; one expects to see lots of disagreeing experts regardless of whether one is correct.
You need to be far more certain of your beliefs to think that (1) “this F’s views are so evil that she should be excluded from speaking to our community, compared to (2) “I shouldn’t defer to this F’s position on D.”
I do agree with you that it’s dangerous to say “my field dominates the study of this topic and you are not in my field so defer to the judgement of my field when looking at this topic” because some fields have not developed techniques which actually help them ascertain truth.
I’m not sure how strongly that holds, but it’s worth mentally noting that “The most qualified people to make policy decision D are all F’s, so anybody who is not an F should defer to any F on D” is a logical fallacy, albeit possibly strong evidence, depending on context.
For example, maybe all the most qualified experts on the existence of God(s) are philosophers. But given LW’s broad atheism, I reckon the people who upvoted your post would have a hard time accepting that a weekend atheist should defer to a theistic philosopher. Someone could start out with the basic beliefs of the head of the IMF and be polarized further in those beliefs by their studies of economics, only remembering the economic evidence favouring their position. If one thinks this happens about equally to those one agrees with and those one disagrees with, then one’s posterior ends up being the same as the prior; one expects to see lots of disagreeing experts regardless of whether one is correct.
You need to be far more certain of your beliefs to think that (1) “this F’s views are so evil that she should be excluded from speaking to our community, compared to (2) “I shouldn’t defer to this F’s position on D.”
I do agree with you that it’s dangerous to say “my field dominates the study of this topic and you are not in my field so defer to the judgement of my field when looking at this topic” because some fields have not developed techniques which actually help them ascertain truth.
Good point!