I am going to go with expert as someone recognised by other experts. Yes that's horribly self referential but it is the basis of everyone who calls themselves doctors or scientist or engineer. In this case I can have expert plumbers and expert removal men.
And in this light an expert is someone whose opinions come from the foundations that all other experts in their industry recognise and agree with. Lysenkoism in other words is not going to fly - not without a shit ton of new evidence that stuns everyone.
So no I am not appealing to authority, I am appealing to science. There are views / opinions / statements that are falsifiable. And if the web is full of falsified statements (let's go with vaccines cause autism), then Google cannot say "51% of web pages that contain "vaccine" also contain "causes autism" therefore that is now true". (and no that's not how Google works, but unless google hardcodes what is truth, it can eventually only go with what is fed into it. And as we are seeing, what is fed into it is getting worse, partly through SEO and partly because more and more of the world is getting on line and we once had a web dominated by the pages of university professors and now it's dominated by drunk twitter rants. Sometimes by the same university professors ...
Humanity has great geniuses, evil scum, but the most of us muddle about in the middle. Science found a way to take the work of a genius and then keep it balanced there in mid air for the next genius to stand on.
We should not assume the best of us, the best of our work, the best of our actions, can be found by averaging the planet.
I do have hope - pop shows demonstrate that we can vote for great singers, so i do trust that mass voting will be part of the solution - I trust in democracy. I am just not convinced Google knows how to fix truth nor is set up for people to vote for truth.
you're making a statement of faith, not science. you want to believe that the experts you have faith in are consistent truth-seekers and truth-tellers, but that's a (political) belief, not a (scientific) fact. you have no way of confirming even a single sliver of veracity that way, especially not through so-called 'expert concensus'. rather than contriving a simplistic strawman, to find truth and facts in a social system, you still must use your own little brain to discern sociopolitical machinations (on top of merely technical observations), rather than naively trying to offload it to others. our brains have evolved over millions of years to do exactly that.
I have faith that a bunch of self interested scientists will happily gleefully point out the flaws in other scientists arguments and shoot them down. And that doing so repeatedly with just one agreed rule - the rule is that experimental results are the only, final arbiter in the dispute. Experiment says your idea is wrong it's wrong.
Of course scientists are not perfect truth seeking missiles - but the incentive structure i science and engineering (pace lysenko) is setup so that what works works abs everything else can take a hike.
An "expert consensus" in scientific terms is for example evolution - a theory that the most intelligent argumentative minds of ten generations has been unable to tear down. Not every scientific or engineering axiom is so robust but hells bells that sort of thing is worth putting my "faith" into.
Yes politics intrudes, but if the last two years has taught us anything it's that politicians standing against experimental outcomes are just like King Canute - the experimental results will simply overwhelm them.
And I honestly have no faith that our brains have evolved to spot other apes lying to us sufficently well that people can do much better than chance even face to face in the same room. Thinking we can spot lies across billboards, tv ads, trade routes seems a bit much.
We can however rationalise incentives - and I suspect you are thinking spotting other peoples incentives is spotting lies. it's usually correlated!
I am going to go with expert as someone recognised by other experts. Yes that's horribly self referential but it is the basis of everyone who calls themselves doctors or scientist or engineer. In this case I can have expert plumbers and expert removal men.
And in this light an expert is someone whose opinions come from the foundations that all other experts in their industry recognise and agree with. Lysenkoism in other words is not going to fly - not without a shit ton of new evidence that stuns everyone.
So no I am not appealing to authority, I am appealing to science. There are views / opinions / statements that are falsifiable. And if the web is full of falsified statements (let's go with vaccines cause autism), then Google cannot say "51% of web pages that contain "vaccine" also contain "causes autism" therefore that is now true". (and no that's not how Google works, but unless google hardcodes what is truth, it can eventually only go with what is fed into it. And as we are seeing, what is fed into it is getting worse, partly through SEO and partly because more and more of the world is getting on line and we once had a web dominated by the pages of university professors and now it's dominated by drunk twitter rants. Sometimes by the same university professors ...
Humanity has great geniuses, evil scum, but the most of us muddle about in the middle. Science found a way to take the work of a genius and then keep it balanced there in mid air for the next genius to stand on.
We should not assume the best of us, the best of our work, the best of our actions, can be found by averaging the planet.
I do have hope - pop shows demonstrate that we can vote for great singers, so i do trust that mass voting will be part of the solution - I trust in democracy. I am just not convinced Google knows how to fix truth nor is set up for people to vote for truth.