When weighing people's opinions, expertise should be rewarded but commitment should be penalized.
Committed people have a psychological need to prove themselves right and to discount contrary evidence. This is due to a combination of conscious and subconscious factors: enhancing one's social and career standing, making oneself feel better about the invested effort, etc. Among people who spent a decade or two arguing in favor of a certain theory, not many would be comfortable admitting they were wrong all along.
There is a period of time when someone is already an expert but not yet committed to any particular belief. This is an excellent time to listen to their opinions. Unfortunately, this period is usually quite short for most people.
Sometimes (as in this case), the commitment is quite obvious; at other times, it may be hard to detect it.
> Committed people have a psychological need to prove themselves right and to discount contrary evidence
This feels like an unfairly broad brush to paint committed people with. True commitment and expertise invariably results in truths indistinguishable from opinion to the outsider, they can offer considerable insight to those who will listen.
> When weighing people's opinions, expertise should be rewarded but commitment should be penalized.
"Penalized" is too dismissive, and borderline bulverism. I would say it is important to listen to the committed while being critical and wary of any bias they may have.
Penalized is just the converse of rewarded. Use negatively-weighted instead if the language is the point that trips you up, but the person who writes “Frankly, I was shaken to the core by what was exposed, yet I understood why the stakes were sky high for those seeking to hide the truth. Why it was a fight to the death to keep a lid on their secrets?” does get those words negatively-weighted in my accounting.
That negative score is added to the positive score from the expertise part of the author when I determine how much credence to give their argument.
Yes, I understood the meaning, and stand by my refinement. However the passage you quote is devoid of argument and full of emotion (and to be fair so is much of the article), it is not the type of information for which I am suggesting a penalty is inappropriate.
When presented with a true argument, information that can be reasoned about or verified, this is where penalization is not appropriate - healthy skepticism ensures you are critical of it, but an attitude of penalization adds a handicap to every argument produced by a committed person regardless of any truth it could hold.
When the argument is almost entirely emotional however I'm inclined to agree - a negative weighting is reasonable.
Was there any particular section in that piece that struck you as deserving of strong positive weighting? I found the entire thing fairly breathless emotional screaming about a topic that quite possibly is one deserving of serious attention, but I'll never realize that through the tears.
No. I agree the article is not well written, and I think this is a case where the author is not the best placed to communicate the issue in a convincing way, he has literally been personally defending thousands of individuals directly affected by the manufacture of PFOS, so it's understandable how the subject is an extremely emotional one for him.
The parent's principle is in fact quite applicable in this case due to the lack of arguments presented along side facts and explanation, but that does not justify over generalizing it to argument from all committed people.
By "penalized", I meant the opinions they offer should be weighted lower (i.e., a penalty should be applied to the weight). Committed people do offer insights. However, for every valuable insight, there are a lot of confidently proclaimed but unfounded claims.
By this argument, few CEOs, salespeople, or advertising execs should ever have been heard.
Also, in the history of science and philosophy, you’ll find that the majority of those whose work significantly advanced human knowledge were committed to their work and to the promotion of their ideas.
> By this argument, few CEOs, salespeople, or advertising execs should ever have been heard.
You say this as if it was a negative.
Besides the history of science is very fuzzy, and complex enough that "commitment" by itself is too vague a term. Also, science is not homogeneous enough for any kind of it to be a positive on every field.
> There is a period of time when someone is already an expert but not yet committed to any particular belief. This is an excellent time to listen to their opinions. Unfortunately, this period is usually quite short for most people.
Is there? Or is this an unfalsifiable classification that people one agrees with can be put in, and people who one doesn't agree with can be pushed out of?
The idea that opinions have no relation to expertise is a general argument against expertise. The magic period during which people have expertise but don't have opinions seems related to that magic period for journalists when they understand all of the facts about a story accurately but have no opinion about what is true and what is not true.
Your "... unfalsifiable classification" question is a fair one, but your final paragraph conflates "opinions" with parent's "commitment" -- a false equivalence that amounts to a strawman argument.
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My own take is that it's less about a period of time [during which loosely-held opinions ostensibly ossify into the kind of commitment that interferes with honest pursuit of truth] and more about mindset, ego and circumstance. Which latter variables are difficult if not impossible to ascertain or verify. Which is why peer-reviewed science -- in removing as much subjectivity as humanly possible -- is our best and only plausible path to truly objective knowledge. (Which in turn is not the only kind of knowledge worth having or sharing! Far from it! But I digress.)
Hmm, perhaps the main explanatory factor for ossified opinions is not the passage of time, but individual personality / circsumstances. If so, it is fortunate: once you discover an unbiased person, you can put greater weight on their opinion for a bit longer.
> When weighing people's opinions, expertise should be rewarded but commitment should be penalized.
This is straight paranoia, unless you plan on only talking to people about their job or topics that don’t interest them.
You’re clearly too committed to your opinion here.
> There is a period of time when someone is already an expert but not yet committed to any particular belief.
Experts without opinions? It sounds like you’re just talking about a toaster. Toasters have no opinions about you when you set the shade to dark, like a monster
Be fair, I’m not suggesting that experts don’t change their opinions. In fact, just like you say, that’s a sign that someone has stopped learning.
I’m suggesting that hand-waving away information because someone has some strong opinions is silly. I don’t believe someone would ever dive into something that deep if they didn’t have some commitment to some opinion about their area of expertise
This logic is actively dangerous. It takes commitment to make any kind of real change in the world. There are way more lucrative careers for a lawyer than public service.
No, listening to every conspiracy-theorist is actively dangerous. Look where the internet is taking us.
Not to say this bloke isn't right on the money. But one would certainly want to read other, less biased sources to weigh the actual gravity of the problem.
Oh come on. So then listen to none of them? Can you really not tell the difference between real conspiracies and the crap peddled by the alt-right? People really just must like dying.
Plainly described, this is a grave threat to public health being deliberately covered up by people with monetary interests. We've faced literally hundreds of these threats since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Remember asbestos?
Public awareness is the first major obstacle. Standing in the way of that means more people will die than necessary.
When weighing people's opinions, expertise should be rewarded but commitment should be penalized.
Committed people have a psychological need to prove themselves right and to discount contrary evidence. This is due to a combination of conscious and subconscious factors: enhancing one's social and career standing, making oneself feel better about the invested effort, etc. Among people who spent a decade or two arguing in favor of a certain theory, not many would be comfortable admitting they were wrong all along.
There is a period of time when someone is already an expert but not yet committed to any particular belief. This is an excellent time to listen to their opinions. Unfortunately, this period is usually quite short for most people.
Sometimes (as in this case), the commitment is quite obvious; at other times, it may be hard to detect it.