As one further remark, I actually think it’s often good to practice Gell-Mann Amnesia.
Just because someone is an expert in one domain, does not mean they should be assumed an expert in other domains. Likewise, just because someone lacks knowledge in one domain, does not meant they should be assumed to lack knowledge in others.
It seems epistemically healthy to practice identifying the specific areas in which a particular person or source is expert, and distinguishing them carefully from the areas where they are not.
One of the tricky bits is that a newspaper makes this somewhat difficult. By purporting to cover all topics, yet actually aggregating the views of a wide range of journalists and editors, it makes it very hard to build stable knowledge about the newspapers’ epistemics. It would be better to pick a particular journalist and get a sense of how much they know about a particular topic that they cover frequently, but this isn’t easy to do in a newspaper format.
Ultimately, possession of a sophisticated prior on the credibility of any source on any topic is an achievement not lightly obtained.
As one further remark, I actually think it’s often good to practice Gell-Mann Amnesia.
Just because someone is an expert in one domain, does not mean they should be assumed an expert in other domains. Likewise, just because someone lacks knowledge in one domain, does not meant they should be assumed to lack knowledge in others.
It seems epistemically healthy to practice identifying the specific areas in which a particular person or source is expert, and distinguishing them carefully from the areas where they are not.
One of the tricky bits is that a newspaper makes this somewhat difficult. By purporting to cover all topics, yet actually aggregating the views of a wide range of journalists and editors, it makes it very hard to build stable knowledge about the newspapers’ epistemics. It would be better to pick a particular journalist and get a sense of how much they know about a particular topic that they cover frequently, but this isn’t easy to do in a newspaper format.
Ultimately, possession of a sophisticated prior on the credibility of any source on any topic is an achievement not lightly obtained.