If my car is broken, I'm going to ask a mechanic to take a look and diagnose it, not a gardener or librarian.
Sure. but when your mechanic tells you that the cost of fixing it is going to be astronomical, you don't just believe him and go into debt to fix it. You're going to consider your own common sense, you're going to read and ask in reddit subs where people who own and have experience with that car gather, and so forth. And given the reputation of many mechanics, you may challenge them; when (true story!) they say I need to let them take apart my engine to clean the fuel injectors, I ask them to show me where in the manufacturer's spec does it list that as normal maintenance.
My point is that, annoying and time-consuming as it might be for the mechanics/scientists, we should not just accept whatever they say without question. It's proper to challenge them. Neither scientists nor mechanics are entitled to unquestioning devotion, especially given their actual observed behavior in the past.
But what we shouldn't do is go to the AntiMechanic subreddit where they all spread conspiracy theories about how mechanics are always lying, and how your vibes about your car are just as good as their diagnostic work, and by the way, here's a book I'm selling and a monetized YouTube channel you can watch, that both DESTROYS the auto mechanic elite and shows you a secret trick about car repair They Don't Want You To Know...
Whatever else I might be arguing about here, let me first express how much I HATE those headlines and video titles with "destroys", "obliterates", etc. I'd much rather see something about "coming to a common understanding".
So yeah, I hate those guys. But consider this in a completely abstract framework, stripped of all practical issues. Picture the debate as a number line, so any given proposal can be represented as a line going off in opposite directions. The origin represents the status quo, and the proposed policy is some point off to the right (or the left, if you like that better). As a simple matter of mathematics, then if we only consider answers in the interval [0, proposal], then we will only ever move in the direction of the proposal; perhaps slowly, but inevitably. And that will happen even if the proposal is dead wrong.
The only way to guard against that inexorable pull in what's potential bad territory is to entertain conversation in the whole interval of [-proposal, proposal] (or at least some degree in the negative direction, anyway).
We must always entertain the possibility that not only is the proposal wrong, but is fundamentally contrary to what's really needed. Failure to do this leads to what we see in our modern regulatory regime: a host of rules that are actively digging the whole deeper, even while we tell ourselves that we're fixing the problem. (There are countless examples, but I hesitate to cite any specifics because I want to keep the argument abstract and not get hung up in other partisan bickering.)
Sure. but when your mechanic tells you that the cost of fixing it is going to be astronomical, you don't just believe him and go into debt to fix it. You're going to consider your own common sense, you're going to read and ask in reddit subs where people who own and have experience with that car gather, and so forth. And given the reputation of many mechanics, you may challenge them; when (true story!) they say I need to let them take apart my engine to clean the fuel injectors, I ask them to show me where in the manufacturer's spec does it list that as normal maintenance.
My point is that, annoying and time-consuming as it might be for the mechanics/scientists, we should not just accept whatever they say without question. It's proper to challenge them. Neither scientists nor mechanics are entitled to unquestioning devotion, especially given their actual observed behavior in the past.