Carlos et al,
Some comments:

On 4 June 2015 at 19:16, Carlos Pires <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Haven't we all been witnessing this erosion for the entire duration of our
> lives?
> Couldn't it be the case that trust in experts is something that is
> context-dependent?
> I mean, don't we all mistrust MDs to some degree until that moment when we
> are helpless and have nobody else to turn to than the physician in front of
> us?
>

I trust my doctor on all counts, modulo knowledge I may have about a
particular situation that I cannot expect the doctor to have.  Likewise for
the mechanic that works on my car, the plumber that installed our new
toilet, the teachers at my kids' school, and the lawyer I consult on legal
matters.


>
> Besides, there are different levels of bias for or against experts.
> I live in what you might call a poor neighborhood, full with people of low
> income and low education levels. Most of the male adults have had odd jobs
> in construction. Do you want to know their opinion of engineers and
> architects? The common saying goes something like "they were studying how
> to be stupid".
>

As I see it, trust certainly occurs on a spectrum, and is based on relative
knowledge between the truster and trustee.  I define trust as a measure of
the reliability of my ability to predict another agent's behaviour.  I
trust Stephen Harper (PM of Canada, unfortunately) to derail every effort
to manage climate change in Canada, because his past behaviour allows me to
inductively infer a pattern that has reliably repeated since he became a
politician.
I trust Google Maps to identify the fastest route between two points, but I
don't trust it's actual time estimates; again this trust is based on
predictability which in turn is based on patterns of past behaviour.
I trust my wife to "have my back," as the saying goes, because she always
has done.  Note that I didn't trust her when we first started dating.  That
trust developed over time as I came to see patterns of her behaviour.
I trust people who call my home offering air duct cleaning services to
actually be scammers (there's a huge problem with fake air duct cleaning
companies in Canada these days). Again, this is based on predictability
arising from patterns of past behaviours. A typical evidentiary data point
is that while the number on my call display indicates their calling from
our local area, when I ask where their company is, they'll say something
"Washington DC" or "Alabama" or "New Brunswick."


>
> The thing is, "trust in experts" is something that is very hard to nail
> down. For people with higher education levels and higher incomes, trust in
> science and in rationality is higher (can't provide citations, but I read
> that in a recent study), and I have the intuition that trust in experts
> follows.
> As for people with lower incomes and lower education levels, they tend to
> trust only those who actually help them. Their evaluations are highly
> subjective, completely biased, and fully related to context, seldom
> abstracted to higher level categories (hence the infamous Dunning–Kruger
> effect). There is no discovery, retraction or scandal to either raise or
> lower these people's opinion of experts: it's all gibberish to them, and
> they can't make sense of it.
> This kind of reminds me of Gibson's ecological theory of perception and of
> theories of situated cognition. People in general, not being experts
> themselves, tend to trust or mistrust experts as a function of their own
> subjective experiences.
>

I don't think it's hard to nail down "trust."  I have quite a useful and
functional "definition" of it, as sketched above.

This last bit - about subjectivity - is unfortunately true, in my
experience, for broad swaths of the population.  It seems to correlate
relatively well with amount and quality of education.


>
> The real problem, it seems to me, is that policy makers in general are
> (for all intents and purposes) like my neighbors: the language of experts
> is gibberish to them, so they focus on visible effects. And so it is that
> politicians will shun expertise when their perceived value is elsewhere, or
> they will prosecute experts when they hurt their bottom line (see the
> recent example of italian politicians prosecuting seismologists).
>

I think it's a systemic error.  It's not a function of ONLY the experts (or
their language), nor is it a function ONLY of the politicians; instead, I
see it as an emergent property of the system that includes politicians
without the desire or capacity to learn at least some of the language of
experts, and of experts who are so accustomed to their own "technical"
language that the either will not or can not rephrase their thoughts to
reach a broader audience.


>
> Afterthought: I find it interesting that we ("we" researchers) create and
> adhere to all sorts of theories (in this case, I'm talking about situated
> cognition) but fail to apply those theories to ourselves.
>

Speak for yourself (and I say that tongue firmly planted in cheek :-)

\V/_  /fas

*Prof. Filippo A. Salustri, Ph.D., P.Eng.*
Email: [log in to unmask]
http://deseng.ryerson.ca/~fil/


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