… the non-expert is probably wise to withhold opinion, or at least not be too dogmatic about it.<\/p>\n
Economics is the first thing that comes to mind. Maybe Keynes is right, maybe Friedman, maybe neither. I tend to lean towards Keynes, but with all the disagreement between the experts, I have to confess that I really don’t know.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, when the experts all agree (or the vast majority), that’s good evidence that the opinion they hold is closer to reality than any contradicting ideas I may have. There are exceptions all through history, of course. Plate tectonics is a recent example, where in the early 20th century geologists mostly laughed at the idea that there were huge moving plates under the earth surface. But as the evidence accumulated, and the old guard died off, it became the accepted theory. And the trend was continually in the direction of more and more acceptance.<\/p>\n
Global climate change is an example today where almost all the experts (climatologists) agree that it is happening, and that human activity is a major cause. As with plate tectonics, the trend has been towards more and more acceptance by the climatologists, to the extent that today it is very hard to find any that disagree. <\/p>\n
People who disagree are mainly television pundits, politicians and businesses that might be hurt by corrective actions, though they have done a job of convincing people that there’s some kind of conspiracy. Even as I wouldn’t ask one of them for medical advice, or understanding about quantum physics, I also doubt their expertise on climate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
… the non-expert is probably wise to withhold opinion, or at least not be too dogmatic about it. Economics is the first thing that comes to mind. Maybe Keynes is right, maybe Friedman, maybe neither. I tend to lean towards Keynes, but with all the disagreement between the experts, I have to confess that I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}