A conversation.
"When experts disagree, usually the best thing to do is listen to what the majority of experts say. There's no *guarantee* that they're right, but they're more likely right than wrong. And if the majority view is overturned, it's almost guaranteed that this will be done by other experts in the field presenting evidence for the minority view, not by random kibitzers."
"For the history buffs in here, while most scientific knowledge is advanced incrementally, the true breakthroughs are usually ridiculed by the reigning experts. That is why appeals to authority are the worst kind of logical fallacy for a scientist."
"That's the pop-history version of scientific progress. The actual #history of #science is very different. Kind of like the difference between 'history buffs' and historians."
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Yes, there are examples—a few—of genuine breakthroughs that were ridiculed by the scientific establishment of the day. I bet you know what they are, because everyone does. They laughed at #Semmelweis, they laughed at #Wegner, they laughed at Luis and Walter #Alvarez, they laughed at #Marshall and #Warren. These things happened.
But they did *not* laugh at #Galileo: indeed, they took his work with deadly seriousness. (And there really wasn't any such thing as a "scientific establishment" at the time.) They did not laugh at #Newton, or #Watt, or #Darwin, or #Gibbs, or #Pasteur, or #Einstein, or #Curie, or #Heisenberg, or #Fisher, or #Watson and #Crick and poor unacknowledged #Franklin, or #Tharp and #Heezen, or #Ostrom and #Bakker, or #Hansen, or the *vast majority* of scientists whose work has fundamentally changed our understanding of the universe.
At least if by "they" you mean scientists working in relevant fields, who understood the questions at hand ... not, in most cases, scientists from other fields, or those with no scientific experience at all. Nor the religious and political ideologues who muddy the waters by creating fake "controversies" to cast doubt on results they know are true, but cannot accept.
In some cases they *disagreed*, quite vociferously. There were debates that descended into shouting matches, professional disagreements turned into personal feuds, once-eminent researchers become sad cranks, ruined careers and shortened lives. Yes. These things happened too, and that's a tragedy.
But most of the time, most researchers in the same fields as the revolutionaries said, "Oh, that makes sense!" Problems that had seemed insoluble suddenly became simple, or at least it was possible to see how there *might* be an elegant solution. Major discoveries spawned a host of medium-sized ones, each of which in turn spawned endless minor ones—and endless minor papers, academic bread and butter for when you can't get steak and lobster. Everyone wins.
Those ideologues I mentioned above? They really, really want you to believe the narrative of ridicule. You might want to consider why.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite My answer is a qualified yes: the majority of experts are more often closer to correct than anyone else. I'm a statistican, so I'm not going to get any more definitive than that. 🙂
I have a PhD in molecular biology
I would like to think you are correct, but I am really not sure
@failedLyndonLaRouchite Trust me! (97.3%, ±1.7% CI.)
The question of why science accepted the then really wierd idea of special relativity has been the subject of some study
iirc, it was becaue there were longstanding anomolies in the data like UV catastrophe and hordes of eminent PhDs had tried and failed to explain for years so Einstein looked really good
@failedLyndonLaRouchite Exactly. Relativity tied a bunch of strange results together in an elegant way. The same applies to some of the other examples on my list—e.g. the reason the Alvarez hypothesis gained widespread acceptance relatively quickly is that none of the other proposed mechanisms for the #KPg #extinction (formerly #KT) fit the rather odd data.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @medigoth
I think that was more about some of the side issues that came up, which are often just trash questions (impossible, irrelevant, etc) which for some reason (looking at you journalists) become associated with the theory they come from, and human minds cannot help but to try to give answers, even where they simply should reject the question as invalid.
All the ingredients for SR were on the table already, it was only a matter of time until we got that theory.
AE got way more grief (rightly so) for the leap from Planck's work to what then became interpreted as "indivisible particles", which in itself was an echo of a long-standing debate regarding light as waves or particles, which had already been proven as wavelike. No one wanted to go backwards, in that aspect.
Pretty much all the low-hanging fruit that was picked by the 1st gen physicists working on these things led them to wrong conclusions, the photoelectric effect being a great example of.
You may be thinking of why AE got the Nobel for that rather than for relativity, which requires bringing Nazism & politics into the conversation.
for many years, iirc, a majority of Phds/economics said that unions and min wage laws were bad and there is why employers don't fire people in a recession and decades of PhD theory were disproved by one guy doing an exp (Truman Bewley yale)
@failedLyndonLaRouchite But was that result received with mockery, or just disagreement? It's the "they laughed at ..." narrative I'm pushing back against specifically.
First, are you actually quoting someone, or starting from a hypothetically typical situation?
@MalthusJohn I'm quoting a Facebook conversation. Happy to provide the link if you want. The first and third quoted paragraphs are mine, the second ("For the history buffs ...") is from someone else. He *pretended* to ask a legitimate question about "what do we do when experts disagree," but was clearly more interested in pushing a narrative than getting an answer.
That helps a lot. I do disagree that when those revolution-type ideas were presented, it was usually by other experts. The biggest reason being that a new field has no experts when launched!
But there is a problem with the ratio, and what its importance would be. I've never counted (or seen anyone else do so) the total # of discoveries, then crossed with the person's expert status, or how many did the laughing or ridiculing (vs harshly, vociferously disagreeing).
That said, I also understand your point (I think) about anti-intellectualism and/or cranks using it as the opposite of an appeal to authority (forgot the name of that fallacy).
Aside from those purposes, I'd ask how many ridiculers does it take to take the wind out of one's sails? How many better models have been abandoned or postponed from this behavior? How many poor models have stayed in the pole position because of it?
That's why I asked about the weight of "most": because we are so susceptible to claims from authoritative figures, just a few of them outweigh a more 'democratic' outcome, which science is not supposed to be of course, but is anyway to a large extent when we talk about consensus, and how many people who 'voted' for the status quo actually read & understand (ie, at least quasi-experts) the proposed alternatives. ("Vote" just meaning going along with the majority as an evolutionary, statistical bet.)
As you opened with, that is the safest bet to place. Until it's not..
@medigoth
we do not do science with anecdotes
we do science with data
so a few anecdotes offered by you are irrelevant to the question: are a maj of experts usually correct ?