Authorities are really useful ways to understand the world.
The vast majority of people would be more correct about the world if they aligned with scientific consensus.
One problem is that journalistic coverage of ideas isn't proportional to beliefs held by experts in that field. Which gives the impression science is constantly changing, and that fringe theories are more widely held than they are.
That's why it's so important for people familiar with the field to help the rest of us who aren't know what "the field considers this a wacky idea".
If you are in the field, attempting to contribute, then I don't think authority is a good rubric. But for those of us who aren't, I think it's necessary. The world is too complex for all of us to make up our own minds on everything.
> But for those of us who aren't, I think it's necessary. The world is too complex for all of us to make up our own minds on everything.
More specifically, attempting to make up our minds on everything will inevitably lead us to accept the simplest superficially plausible explanations (that fit our existing biases), and the world is too complex for all those simple explanations to be correct, so we'll mainly find ourselves in the local maxima that have already been explored and properly abandoned by specialists.
The vast majority of people would be more correct about the world if they aligned with scientific consensus.
One problem is that journalistic coverage of ideas isn't proportional to beliefs held by experts in that field. Which gives the impression science is constantly changing, and that fringe theories are more widely held than they are.
That's why it's so important for people familiar with the field to help the rest of us who aren't know what "the field considers this a wacky idea".