On Challenging the Experts
I. An Epistemic Conundrum
Here is a question for applied epistemology. Say there's some field of study, and the conventional view in it about some issue you're interested in is P. (For example: the conventional view in biology about the origin of species is the theory of evolution.) There is a person who is outside the conventionally recognized group of experts. This person could be you, or it could be someone you have just heard of on the internet, etc. This person has arguments against P and in favor of some alternative view, which seem to him persuasive.
Q: What should be your attitude about this non-conventional researcher? Should you defer to the conventional experts and dismiss his view? Should you first read his arguments and try to assess them yourself (or, if the person is you, accept the arguments that we have already said you find persuasive)? Should you withhold judgment?
Some examples:
In biology, the conventional view is the theory of evolution. But you meet a preacher on your campus who rejects evolution. He has a battery of arguments purporting to show the absurdity and incoherence of evolution. These arguments are not all stupid on their face; some of them, on their face, appear to make sense to normal people, including you.
You are taught in your physics class that perpetual motion machines are impossible. However, you have thought up a design for a perpetual motion machine that, as far as you can tell, should work. Try as you might, you can't see anything wrong with it.
You learned in a physics class, as well as in your culture in general, that Einstein made an amazing discovery called the theory of relativity. When the physics teacher tries to explain it to you, it sounds contradictory. You meet a philosophy professor who says that the theory of relativity is false. He has some weird story about how the theory was adopted because of mistaken philosophical views.
You find it obvious that immigration harms domestic workers and therefore needs to be tightly controlled. But some libertarian ideologues on the internet keep insisting that immigration helps the economy. Furthermore, they say that almost all economists agree with them.
You read Ayn Rand and became convinced that selfishness is the key to good, rational behavior. But almost all ethicists (as even Rand acknowledges) consider egoism obviously wrong.
All of these are realistic examples. All these things happen to real people reasonably often. And there are many more. It is in fact extremely common that, if a non-expert thinks about the conventional view of something, that non-expert will think of what appear to him powerful reasons for rejecting the conventional view, and will arrive at some very different view instead.
What is the rational treatment of such conflicts?
II. Ignore the Experts?
I think I have seen two foolish views among the folk: (1) Always ignore the experts. (2) Always believe the experts.
First foolish view: "What other people say is completely irrelevant. All that matters is the actual evidence about the issue, which you should assess yourself. Don't be a sheep; think for yourself! Just look at the arguments. If you find that the experts' arguments are no good, then it doesn't matter at all how many people endorse them. The fact that the experts say P doesn't prove anything. People laughed at Columbus when he said the Earth was round! The so-called 'experts' are wrong all the time!"
It appears to me that many people hold this view (especially libertarians, I am sorry to say). I think something like this view is also encouraged in "critical thinking" classes. But it is extremely foolish and naive. You could think this if you have spent anywhere between 0 and 30 seconds thinking about it. After 30 seconds, the following sort of facts should have occurred to you:
The experts have certain cognitive advantages. They generally score high on IQ tests, for example. They have generally spent a long time studying and learning about the subject. Years, even decades. As a result, they have a lot of knowledge about the issue in question, as well as a lot of background knowledge about the subject in general. They have the benefit of interaction with each other. There are professional rewards attached to revealing flaws in other people's research. This creates a situation in which ideas in a given field are subjected to demanding scrutiny by many smart, well-informed critics, and in which researchers are very careful. These experts are also forced to confront and think about alternative possibilities; they can't just think about their own view all the time, or just listen to other people who agree with them.
Non-experts typically lack one or more of those advantages. Sometimes they lack almost all of them. The non-expert might be smart but have thought about the subject for 1/100 of the amount of time, know 1/10,000th of the information that the expert knows, have never had his ideas subjected to searching criticism by multiple intelligent and well-informed critics, and never have been exposed to many different ways of thinking about the subject.
Cognitive advantages like that positively affect one's probability of arriving at the truth. This effect is not eliminated by "just looking at the arguments" or "just looking at the evidence".
Subjects that humans have studied for centuries are typically not trivially simple. They commonly are complex, there is a lot to know about them, and a lot of ideas that have been thought about them.
If people have to study for multiple years to become conventionally recognized experts on X, then probably it is not possible to learn everything that the conventionally recognized experts have learned in an afternoon, or a week, or even a month.
It is not generally possible for human beings to quickly summarize all their background information and experiences that contribute to their plausibility judgments about things. Often, human beings cannot identify all the relevant information even if they try, let alone state it in a few minutes in an off-the-cuff verbal conversation or an informal blog comment.
When people "look at the evidence" or "look at the arguments", they often go wrong. Often, errors are difficult to detect, especially for non-experts. So saying "I looked at the arguments for myself" does not rule out the possibility that you are completely wrong about the arguments.
Therefore, obviously, experts are typically more likely to be correct than non-experts. (From a, b, + c.)
Also obviously, experts are not guaranteed to be correct. Nobody ever claimed that they were. The fact that experts are not guaranteed to be correct does not make it rational to believe a non-expert's judgment instead of the experts. That's dumb. If experts are fallible, it does not follow that non-experts are infallible.
A single person has some probability of making a mistake, however smart and well-informed they are. If a second person evaluates the same issue, the probability that both will make that mistake will, in general, be strictly less than the probability of the first one doing it. And so on. So, obviously, the probability of many people being wrong is, ceteris paribus, lower than the probability of a smaller group, or a single person, being wrong. Of course, the ceteris paribus condition is not satisfied if the one person is much smarter than the group, has special information, etc. But see again points (a) and (b) above. If the larger group, besides being larger, also has greater cognitive advantages, then it's just completely obvious that they are more likely to be correct.
None of these points are changed if the "non-expert" in question is you. So the advice to ignore the experts in favor of "thinking for yourself" is, on its face, plainly irrational.
Many people don't like the above facts. But they need to get over themselves and accept reality. Which of the above points is not factually true?
The most common silliness is to repeat that experts have sometimes been wrong. If you're going to do that, read point (e) again. How many times have non-experts been wrong? I promise you, it's a lot more.
III. Always Believe the Experts?
All that being said, it is not necessarily right to conclude that we should always accept the conventional wisdom and ignore challenges. That view is not as obviously silly as the "ignore the experts completely" view, but it is still oversimplified. I think there are some cases in which a revisionary view about a subject can reasonably be believed in preference to the orthodox view. So I want to give some rules of thumb about that. Here are some things that must be considered:
Does the person giving the revisionary view know the conventional views? I mean does he have a solid understanding of them, equal to the understanding of the experts who hold those views? This matters, because, while it is generally difficult to expose an error in the received view in some field, it is virtually impossible to do so while not fully understanding that view.
When, for example, Einstein radically revised physics, he did not do so without first thoroughly understanding the conventional views of his time and why people held them.
Similarly, if you cannot explain conventional economists' case for free trade, then there's virtually zero chance that you're able to correct them on that issue.
Also worth considering: do the experts understand the revisionary view? Are the reasons (allegedly) supporting that view things that the experts would have been aware of and took into account when they formed the conventional view?
Sometimes, the experts are biased. But note that advancing this hypothesis does not obviate point (a) above. (Even if they're biased, you still almost certainly cannot do better than them without understanding their views.) Note also that one should not assert bias merely on the grounds that the experts disagree with you. Examples:
There's no objective basis for thinking that economists have a pro-immigrant bias, independent of the assumption that immigration is bad (which cannot be assumed).
There is a reason for thinking, e.g., that educators have a pro-education bias. E.g., college professors are biased towards overestimating the benefits of college. The reason for thinking this would be that we know in general that people are self-interested and often self-aggrandizing.
Some fields of study in general have better cognitive credentials than others. For instance, one can more reasonably hypothesize that the field of literary theory lacks genuine knowledge than that physics lacks genuine knowledge. So it is more reasonable to reject the received view of literary theorists.
Sometimes, the received view about an issue in a given field depends on more than just expertise in that field. In that case, one should be more skeptical of the received view.
Ex.: cultural relativism is widely accepted in anthropology. But the view is not a purely anthropological view; it is a philosophical (meta-ethical) view. So it is not clear that one should trust the expertise of anthropologists on this question.
This sort of thing happens most often with philosophy -- people in some non-philosophy field will assume some philosophical view for no apparent reason and incorporate it into their theories in their own field. People also tend to be very dogmatic about philosophical views that they have assumed for no reason.
Compare example 3 from section I above. That is actually true. In his book, Relativity, Einstein invokes the philosophy of logical positivism to support the theory of relativity. Other physicists do this too. They usually neglect to state (and perhaps fail to even notice) that they are making philosophical assumptions. You don't need to be a great expert to verify this; just check out Einstein's book. Later, Bohr invoked positivism in his debate with Einstein over quantum mechanics.
Apropos of which, it is important to note exactly what a dispute turns on. Identify whether the key point of dispute between the received view and the revisionary view is a difference in an empirical prediction, a mathematical calculation, a philosophical assumption, etc.
Look at the content of the revisionary view and ask: is it the sort of thing that you would expect someone would come up with even if it was false? Is it a conspiracy theory? Does it play into some established political ideology? Does it just seem, on its face, delusional or crazy, e.g., like the theory that space aliens built the pyramids, or the theory that the Holocaust was a hoax?
There are many crazy-sounding ideas out there. It's reasonable right now to assume that almost all of them are false.
You are not under any obligation to listen to such things. Just because someone makes an assertion, does not mean that you have to waste your time evaluating their reasons. People can write thousands of pages devoted to delusions. You also don't have to suspend judgment until you read them; you can reject them. For instance, you don't have to read the work of Holocaust-deniers. You can just dismiss them.
But note that you should not just declare that anything that you disagree with "sounds crazy". You especially should not take some ideological point of yours and declare that things that conflict with it are "crazy". Hint: if people on the other side of the political spectrum would generally be sympathetic to P, then P probably isn't just crazy.
Sometimes, when you refuse to listen to things, you'll be wrong. That still doesn't mean that you have to listen to everything.