How does one explore a complicated issue when you believe that many of the experts are biased and you do not know which are not? Past posts dealt with

David Friedman’s Substack

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2023-03-18 13:30:06

How does one explore a complicated issue when you believe that many of the experts are biased and you do not know which are not? Past posts dealt with versions of that problem in two contexts, climate and the origin of Covid. I know of four solutions.

Deduce as much as you can from facts that everyone agrees on. If you want to persuade other people, do it with arguments simple enough so that an intelligent layman can check them for himself. I did that in my calculation of how much more land would become warm enough for human use with a given amount of warming. I did it again in my Bayesian analysis of the origin of Covid.

Here is another example. When Brett Kavanaugh was proposed for the Supreme Court , Christine Blasey Ford, a professor at  Palo Alto University, charged that he had tried to rape her at a party when both of them were in high school. I knew nothing about Kavanaugh that would tell me how likely the charge was to be true, nothing about Ford that would tell me how likely she was to be telling the truth, and any reports I could get on either would be from people likely to be badly biased in one direction or the other. That raised the question of how, with information publicly available, I could evaluate the charge.

Most people would not lie about that sort of thing but some, with a sufficiently strong incentive, would — there have been several recent cases where stories along similar lines were shown to be false. When the story first came out, the only evidence for it, other than Ford’s claim, was that she and Kavanaugh were both high school students in the same area at the same time.

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