Comment on Government ignored its own experts over wildlife protection

• SJ0@lemmy.fbxl.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Not necessarily. Elected officials aren’t just there to spin a roulette wheel of experts and then slavishly implement whatever those experts propose.

  Being around experts at times, I know full well that most experts end up with tunnel vision. They see the one thing that they care about, to the exclusion of all the other things.

  In such a situation, you can end up with an absurdity such as spending massive resources on something that doesn’t really matter when something that matters a whole lot ends up getting completely ignored because you don’t have any experts that care about that thing. I know an engineer who would take virtually any job, and start planning to tear out everything that’s already there and completely redo it because it’s usually not installed to his standard. Well that’s great, but when the job is to do something like setting up a new button, a job that would take an hour and it’s going to take 6 months. The expert opinion of what’s best and the holistic opinion of finding a balance between what’s best and what’s practical are at odds.

  In the 1800s, a Hungarian doctor practicing in Switzerland proposed washing your hands thoroughly in between handling and giving birth to children. At that time, the difference between giving birth using a midwife and giving birth using an expert doctor was a massive difference in mortality rate, having a child with a doctor was a death sentence for the child and potentially for the mother. The experts of the day scoffed at him and he was widely maligned, and he died in an asylum.

  Experts created the field of eugenics, And without considering anything else the theory of evolution suggests that the field of eugenics is factually grounded in reality if you are an expert with blinders on. It’s only when you draw your view out that you realize the societal implications of policies based on eugenics and the fact that they are evil. (There was some debate a couple years ago as to whether eugenics was practically effective, which is an absurd argument. We know that it works, because we do it all the time on domesticated species. If you select for plants that grow bigger fruit, then you’re going to get bigger fruit.)

  In the past, the entrenched opinion of experts was that racism is factually correct. There were swaths of experts who would tell you what ethnicity people were based on the measurements of their skull, and they could tell you how superior ones bloodline was based on that. In that case the experts were wrong and evil. While its true they were quacks, they were credentialed and esteemed quacks.

  Experts in Archaeology believed for a long time that myths were just made up stories, but some people decided to check out the locations mentioned in the stories and were surprised to find archeological evidence of some parts of those myths. The Minoan civilization was completely lost to history until relatively recently, buried in the myth of Theseus. This shows that folk wisdom (which obviously isn’t always correct or fully correct as the myth is twisted by thousands of years of retelling) is sometimes more instructive than the experts.

  In 2007, the experts all agreed that the economy was stronger than ever before and there couldn’t possibly be a financial crash. Once the crash occurred, there was a huge amount of tax money (and debt) spent bailing out banks and putting the gas on “the economy”, and many expert economists believed it recovered. In reality, their aggregate view missed that some regions were becoming incredibly rich and some regions were dying based in part on the consequences of expert interventions, so not only did they cause harm, but they didn’t (and in many cases still don’t) realize they were doing so and in fact believed they had succeeded.

  In 2021, the experts all agreed that inflation was transitory and no action needed to be taken because it would disappear on its own. Outsiders were yelling from the rooftops about inflation as early as mid-2020 but were told they were wrong and stupid and ignorant and not an expert.

  Experts helped develop a climate change policy that provided carbon credits if a company disposed of the hydrofluorocarbon HFC-23, which was a chemical mostly used to produce HFC-22. Factories started to produce HFC-22 with the express intent of creating and destroying HFC-23 because the carbon credits were worth more than the HFC-22 produced at the end. When this scam was exposed (in fact the scheme ended up incentivizing the use of now inexpensive HFC-22 instead of more environmentally friendly options), China then threatened to release the greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, in what many called “Climate Blackmail”.

  So the job of a representative isn’t to try to be an expert themselves, but to be well-rounded and aggregate many different sources of information including experts from a number of different fields who may have conflicting opinions on a subject, as well as personal experience and wisdom, in a way that a specialist in one field cannot. That means that often you do what the expert suggests, but other times you don’t because the world is more complicated than just asking one question.

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  • snooggums@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    When you don't listen to the experts and things get worse then you should be blamed for not listening.

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