Diceman

I think we're arguing about arguments.

__________________

[drill][medic][conduct][tg-c1][tpf-c1]
[ma-c2][taw-c1]

leejo

What do you mean "we", Paleface?

I'm rooting for Tybalt on this one. I've always wanted to be a neurosurgeon or a fighter pilot...

CingularDuality

Then what are you arguing about?

__________________

Become a supporting member! -- Shop at the Tactical Market!

Take the world's smallest political quiz! "I was touched by His Noodly Appendage."
TacticalGamer TX LAN/BBQ Veteran:

xTYBALTx

^

__________________
Current good song: Justice - Stress

leejo

I've been reading this thread and I either have no idea what you're talking about Tybalt, or have no idea how you think it makes any sense. For me, and for whatever it's worth, a better explanation than "^" would help.

sordavie

Um. Ok. So can we agree that in many cases experts are in a better position (relative to laymen to have evidence for their view, and that they usually have better tools (sharper concepts, more rigorous reasoning, etc..) to judge how strongly that evidence is supports their view? If we agree on that, I don't see how you should always prefer, in the case of the truth of some proposition being presented to you, reason and logic over the word of an expert. Sometimes, perhaps many times in interesting cases, you and I just don't have the right conceptual tools to make any good judgement on whatever reasoning the expert did to come to her conclusion.

It's not just mistakes in reasoning about evidence. Remember that any evidence supports an infinite number of hypotheses. That experiment x worked under y conditions 30 times supports a number of different hypotheses. This is not only a fundamental problem with science, but with inductive knowledge in general. Is it that the experiment supports a new type of radiation? Is it that it supports a new type of effect from an already known sort of radiation? The evidence may be neutral between those two hypotheses. In fact, this has happened a lot in science. Which conclusion you'll end up finding is reasonable is going to depend on your framework. A framework is basically all your background beliefs. There is no way to reason about whether evidence is good or bad outside of a framework. But, the background beliefs of a layman is not the same as that of an expert in physics. The evidence that a physicist has for his belief that quarks exist also supports a number of other hypotheses wherein quarks do not exist. The physicist beliefs the evidence supports the existence of quarks more strongly because of his other background beliefs, which may be supported only by other background beliefs.

So, look, you can have two guys come to you with the same exact evidence for two wildly different conclusions. Which conclusion will you judge is true? You're going to make a judgement here. Either one is true or none are true. But, your judgement here is not going to be based purely on reason and logic. It'll be based on your background beliefs, which may or may not be supported by reason and logic. Reason and logic by itself does not support much -- tautologies for sure, but nothing more interesting than that.

So, your claim is that you prefer reason, evidence, and logic over the word of somebody with credentials. You should make it clear whether you count the reasoning, evidence, and logic that the guy with credentials had in determining whether to believe her (in the case that she doesn't provide it to you, like in most encyclopedia articles) or if it's only the reasoning, evidence, and logic that is presented to you for you to make your own conclusion. You may tell me to look at your previous posts again, but that ambiguity is just not clear. The former seems reasonable enough. If the expert has some good reason for her belief, then I'll believe it too, even if I don't know or cannot understand that evidence. The latter seems unreasonable. Even if the expert has some good reasons for her belief I must know or understand that evidence before I'll believe her.

__________________

sordavie

By the way, in wikipedia, a lot the evidence provided is usually pretty bad or incomplete. If one were to go just by evidence, one should not believe many of the articles on there. In that case, you should think wikipedia is a pretty bad idea.

Laymen, in general, just do not have very good reasons for their beliefs. Ask any regular guy why 1+1=2. I take it almost nobody can give you a good answer to that. Even if they knew the axiomatization of arithmetic, could they explain how one gets from the axiomatization to the sentence 1+1=2. But people will give reasons for this. They think that they know it. They think they have reason to believe it. But their reasons are bad. The only good reason that most people have for believing 1+1=2 is that mathematicians or their teachers or their parents tell them so. In the first case that's an expert with credentials telling them so, and in the latter two cases that's non-experts with out credentials (but being trustworthy in that topic) reporting what experts say.

When was the last time you thought about your evidence and reasons for believing that 1+1=2?

__________________

leejo

I was going to throw Fermat's last theorem at him but 1+1=2 is fine

Try to get through 1 page of the proof to Fermat's theorem without expert assistence, though, or by reading (and understanding!) about 16 college-and-higher textbooks.

xTYBALTx

I think I have a pretty good way to sum up what I've been trying to say:

With Wikipedia, since it is a faceless mass, an article must be very persuasive to be believed. This leads many Wiki atricles to be presented in a tight, logical manner with very little taken for granted. I like that. Experts will still be used and may even contribute. There is nothing an expert will cite in a real encyclopedia which can not be in Wikipedia.*

Experts, on the other hand, don't always need to present their case in such a methodical and cold fashion. They can take more for granted because their credentials buy them a 'free pass' from laymen like us.

I prefer the former version, apparently a lot of you prefer the other. As I said in my first post in this thread, "To each his own."


*There are countless articles in Wikipedia I won't believe. Please don't take my line of reasoning as suggesting that Wikipedia is free from error, beyond dispute, infallible, or even close to any of these things.

__________________
Current good song: Justice - Stress

sordavie

1+1=2 is very hard to prove. Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead attempt to do so in their massive text Principia Mathematica by grounding the principles of mathematics on pure logic. They don't show that 1+1=2 until page 362. Moreover, it's widely regarded that Russell and Whitehead failed to ground mathematics on logic in that book. Showing that 1+1=2 is probably way harder than showing Fermat's theorem is true. lol

__________________

CingularDuality

No, I rather like the original topic, which is Wikipedia with the added bonus of credible experts contributing. Which is how this whole discussion got started, when you said that experts don't add credibility:

__________________

Become a supporting member! -- Shop at the Tactical Market!

Take the world's smallest political quiz! "I was touched by His Noodly Appendage."
TacticalGamer TX LAN/BBQ Veteran:

Steeler

There are, however, a lot of fishy or outright fraudulent credentialed "experts" out there.

__________________

xTYBALTx

Cing, this is getting laborious.

__________________
Current good song: Justice - Stress

icky

I am an expert witness because I say I am.

__________________
Peace through fear... since 1947!

xTYBALTx

Well, you are an expert!

__________________
Current good song: Justice - Stress