Well, yeah, if an authority says that the Hubble constant is 68 km/s/Mpc and you interpret that in such a way that if the Hubble constant is 67 km/s/Mpc or 69 km/s/Mpc the authority is wrong, then you’d better assume the authority is wrong—though that’s not a very informative assumption and anyway in the real world authorities often make claims more vague (i.e. whose negation is less vague) than that.
Well, sure, you have a relatively high opinion of authority. But even a vague claim needs the expert to be significantly better than chance to be promoted to your attention.
(And, well, this guy isn’t a physicist. He’s involved in medicine. There’s less likely to be clear-cut experimental proof the expert can simply point out in order to overcome your prior. Instead, you get a huge, enormous pile of famouscases where The Experts Screwed Up.)
Instead, you get a huge, enormous pile of famous cases where The Experts Screwed Up.
But there also are many many cases where the experts didn’t screw up, which are less famous for obvious reasons. Believing doctors are always wrong sounds kind of extreme to me; sometimes they are right. (Otherwise, how comes life expectancy has increased so much in the past century?)
Well, yeah, if an authority says that the Hubble constant is 68 km/s/Mpc and you interpret that in such a way that if the Hubble constant is 67 km/s/Mpc or 69 km/s/Mpc the authority is wrong, then you’d better assume the authority is wrong—though that’s not a very informative assumption and anyway in the real world authorities often make claims more vague (i.e. whose negation is less vague) than that.
Well, sure, you have a relatively high opinion of authority. But even a vague claim needs the expert to be significantly better than chance to be promoted to your attention.
(And, well, this guy isn’t a physicist. He’s involved in medicine. There’s less likely to be clear-cut experimental proof the expert can simply point out in order to overcome your prior. Instead, you get a huge, enormous pile of famous cases where The Experts Screwed Up.)
But there also are many many cases where the experts didn’t screw up, which are less famous for obvious reasons. Believing doctors are always wrong sounds kind of extreme to me; sometimes they are right. (Otherwise, how comes life expectancy has increased so much in the past century?)