Rationally Speaking: Should non-experts shut up? The skeptic's catch-22 - 0 views
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You can read the talk here, but in a nutshell, Massimo was admonishing skeptics who reject the scientific consensus in fields in which they have no technical expertise - the most notable recent example of this being anthropogenic climate change, about which venerable skeptics like James Randi and Michael Shermer have publicly expressed doubts (though Shermer has since changed his mind).
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I'm totally with Massimo that it seems quite likely that anthropogenic climate change is really happening. But I'm not sure I can get behind Massimo's broader argument that non-experts should defer to the expert consensus in a field.
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First of all, while there are strong incentives for a researcher to find errors in other work in the field, there are strong disincentives for her to challenge the field's foundational assumptions. It will be extremely difficult for her to get other people to agree with her if she tries, and if she succeeds, she'll still be taking herself down along with the rest of the field.
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Second of all, fields naturally select for people who accept their foundational assumptions. People who don't accept those assumptions are likely not to have gone into that field in the first place, or to have left it already.
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Sometimes those foundational assumptions are simple enough that an outsider can evaluate them - for instance, I may not be an expert in astrology or theology, but I can understand their starting premises (stars affect human fates; we should accept the Bible as the truth) well enough to confidently dismiss them, and the fields that rest on them. But when the foundational assumptions get more complex - like the assumption that we can reliably model future temperatures - it becomes much harder for an outsider to judge their soundness.
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we almost seem to be stuck in a Catch-22: The only people who are qualified to evaluate the validity of a complex field are the ones who have studied that field in depth - in other words, experts. Yet the experts are also the people who have the strongest incentives not to reject the foundational assumptions of the field, and the ones who have self-selected for believing those assumptions. So the closer you are to a field, the more biased you are, which makes you a poor judge of it; the farther away you are, the less relevant knowledge you have, which makes you a poor judge of it. What to do?
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luckily, the Catch-22 isn't quite as stark as I made it sound. For example, you can often find people who are experts in the particular methodology used by a field without actually being a member of the field, so they can be much more unbiased judges of whether that field is applying the methodology soundly. So for example, a foundational principle underlying a lot of empirical social science research is that linear regression is a valid tool for modeling most phenomena. I strongly recommend asking a statistics professor about that.
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there are some general criteria that outsiders can use to evaluate the validity of a technical field, even without “technical scientific expertise” in that field. For example, can the field make testable predictions, and does it have a good track record of predicting things correctly? This seems like a good criterion by which an outsider can judge the field of climate modeling (and "predictions" here includes using your model to predict past data accurately). I don't need to know how the insanely-complicated models work to know that successful prediction is a good sign.
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And there are other more field-specific criteria outsiders can often use. For example, I've barely studied postmodernism at all, but I don't have to know much about the field to recognize that the fact that they borrow concepts from complex disciplines which they themselves haven't studied is a red flag.
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the issue with AGW is less the science and all about the political solutions. Most every solution we hear in the public conversation requires some level of sacrifice and uncertainty in the future.Politicians, neither experts in climatology nor economics, craft legislation to solve the problem through the lens of their own political ideology. At TAM8, this was pretty apparent. My honest opinion is that people who are AGW skeptics are mainly skeptics of the political solutions. If AGW was said to increase the GDP of the country by two to three times, I'm guessing you'd see a lot less climate change skeptics.