Quote Originally Posted by jackal2 View Post
I think on any subject you need to have discussion and debate, which provides a choice for the public to make. Otherwise you don't have a democracy. You're just leaving the decisions to a bunch of unelected, self-appointed 'experts' and keeping the public out of decision-making, which might be regarded as good politics in North Korea but I wouldn't recommend it here.

A lot of the time, the public will eventually side with the view of the 'majority of experts', but that doesn't mean there isn't in value in having a thorough and ongoing debate, with all views articulated by publicly elected representatives interpreting the evidence as they see it, where the public has a choice and can even change its mind if new evidence comes to light or they lose confidence in the 'expert' view.

There have been many occasions in history when the "majority of experts" in a field have proven over time to be wrong, or where the evidence on reflection proved to be far more nuanced then first thought. And that's not to mention the fact that the very definition of who is an 'expert' is subjective anyway - the question of who you count in or out of your pool of experts, and who makes that decision, may well define what the 'majority view' ends up being.
I think with COVID, one of the major challenges was that - at the start - no-one knew very much at all. It's about how you deal with uncertainty... experts don't know either, but they're far more likely to be correct (or at least become more correct over time as evidence emerges) than people with no expertise. Or with expertise in a different field.

Another challenge is that we had whole load of different fields of experts - in how viruses act, in how air particles circulate, in how humans behave, vaccine development, in economics, in healthcare systems and provision, in public health, and so on. How they speak to each other, how expertise interacts, who gets priority, how they learn from each other etc.

Where I agree with jackal is that we don't want a tyranny of experts. With COVID, we couldn't just "follow the science" because science won't tell us what our priorities are, and ought to be. Whether to open or close schools was one of the most difficult, and while science will inform our decision, ultimately it's about priorities and balancing them. That's where we need to call upon our elected leaders, public discussion and debate, and so on.

Where I'd put things slightly is that although we absolutely need debate and discussion about priorities and about what we ought to do, we still need to privilege expert opinion over non-expert opinion so that we can have a solid base of facts on which to base our discussions, or as solid a base as we can. I agree that there are some fuzzy boundaries about who is and who is not an expert, but I don't think it's that subjective overall. What academic qualifications do people have, what's their job role, how much research have they done, has it been peer-reviewed?

There's too much false balance in the media... here's an expert with decades of experience, and for another view... and given equal weight and time... here's a crank with a podcast to publicise, or a paid shill for some shadowy 'think tank' spouting ideological nonsense or wishful thinking. Or someone who's famous for an entirely different reason, and tries to use that trust/recognition/credibility to disguise the fact that they don't have any relevant expertise.

A lot of people believe that the truth will always win out through debates, but that's only the case if both sides play by the rules. Experts will often be reluctant to commit because they're aware of the level of uncertainty, but the spoofers can just blithely assert nonsense. It's so much quicker to make up convincing-sounding falsehoods than it is to go out and debunk them. Many experts aren't - with all due respect - the most confident media or debate performers, because that's not their skillset. But sometimes they're up against people where that's precisely their job. This is one of the ways in which Big Tobacco suppressed evidence of links between smoking and cancer for decades.

The point about experts is that their chances of being right are so much higher than any given randomer who thinks that "research" means googling for information that already backs up what they want to think. It's certainly true that experts might not be right at the moment, but the point about science is that it changes as the evidence changes. To people who don't understand, that looks like flip-flopping and inconsistency, but it's not.