Thread by @phl43

I think people who find that weird just don’t appreciate how much sway authority has over midwits. They really don’t care how nonsensical the argument is: as long as they consider the person or institution making it authoritative on the topic, they will accept the conclusion.

https://twitter.com/binarybits/status/1491474062538858500

I already knew that before, but the pandemic really impressed that on me. Many people simply cannot comprehend that someone with no relevant credentials might be right against someone who they think has them, regardless of how clear it is that they are in fact right.

What’s funny is that, in many cases, the people they consider authoritative on a topic don’t actually have relevant expertise in virtue of their credentials (think about how people trust physicians to opine on epidemic modeling), but it doesn’t matter. What matters is perception.

This is very weird if you are reasonably intelligent, but that’s how many people function. And to be clear, it’s not even necessarily a bad thing, because it’s not obvious at all that it would be better if people didn’t defer to authority like that.

In fact, I think it’s pretty clear it would be much worse, because people who are incapable of seeing when someone they perceive as authoritative makes an obviously fallacious argument clearly aren’t going to be good at adjudicating the facts for themselves.

You see that with people who embrace antivax nonsense. But the fact that deference to authority is necessary only highlights how important it is that knowledge-producing institutions be truth-conducive environments and that people correctly associate credentials with expertise.

The problem is that often neither is the case or much less than we’d like it to be. To be clear, I don’t even think the crack pipes story is a great example of that, but that’s just what prompted those very general observations so I’m just rolling with it.