So you’ve been reading down a rabbit hole and you have seen something that doesn’t make sense. You feel a quiver in your heart that feels like a cross between excitement and fear. Could all the people who already know stuff be Wrong™. Could eminent researchers in their field be working on a wrong model?
Maybe you have a disease or condition and you followed the directions of the doctors or experts exactly and found results opposite to the intended results. That’s when you started googling. You found an obscure blog written in 2005 by someone with the same problem. You find a few people proposing a different working mechanism and you are rapidly falling down the rabbit hole…
IF and that’s a big bold and underlined “if”, the experts are wrong… What is the shape of the world you would expect to see? What “evidence” would you need before you started getting excited, calling national newspapers and demanding your Nobel prize for groundbreaking research?
For consideration, what information on these layers of existence would matter:
- Personal - you can't always do experiments, but maybe there's something available?
- Anecdotal - you can't just ask around, or can you? What counts as valid?
- Research papers - you are probably not the only one, but you might have to dig to find the papers. What if you can find them? What if you can't understand them?
- Academics - locked up in their ivory towers, sometimes they do invent new working models. There's a lot of global academic institutions, how many of them need to be muttering of discourse to matter as genuine evidence?
- Medical - You might find a rogue doctor claiming to fix chronic fatigue with seawater but when is it time to start taking them seriously? (Warning: I haven't even googled this to check if there is one person doing this)
- Countercultural experts - There's this one guy on Youtube that is yelling about it. When is it time to take him seriously?
- Communities - okay there's a Facebook, Reddit or obscure forum community forming of people with the same problem, but they aren't very scientific about working out what is and isn't working. When do they become legitimate sources?
- Someone claims to have completely made the condition disappear using arbitrary methods. There's challenge but there's some evidence here?
- Models - you ask many experts. They say you are wrong but can't explain why in effective ways. They send you to papers that don't quite prove what they are claiming. When you point that out, they get grumpy and communicate less.
Dissent
I'm interested in the nature of dissent, what it feels like, how to quantify it's validity and how to integrate it better into the scientific process. Science MUST disagree with itself but it often rejects disagreement without taking it seriously.
What does valid dissent look like?
I believe I have found a perfect example where the "Medical Model is Wrong," and I am currently working on a post about it. However, I am swamped with other tasks, I wonder if I will ever finish it.
In my case, I am highly confident that my model is correct, while the majority of the medical community is wrong. Using your bullet points:
1.Personal: I have personally experienced this disease and know that the standard treatments do not work.
2.Anecdotal: I am aware of numerous cases where the conventional treatment has failed. In fact, I am not aware of any cases where it has been successful.
3.Research papers: I came across a research paper from 2022 that shares the same opinion as mine.
4.Academics: Working in academia, I am well aware of its limitations. In this specific case, there is a considerable amount of inertia and a lack of communication between different subfields, as accurately described in the book "Inadequate Equilibria" by EY.
5.Medical: Most doctors hold the same opinion because they are influenced by their education. Therefore, if 10 doctors provide the same response, it should not be considered as 10 independent opinions.
6.Countercultural experts: No idea here
7.Communities: I have not explored this extensively, but completing this post I am talking about might be the beginning
8. Someone claims to have completely made the condition disappear using arbitrary methods. I am not personally aware of any such cases but I suspect that it is feasible and could potentially be relatively simple.
9.Models: I have a precise mechanistic model of the disease and why the treatments fail to cure it. I work professionally in a field closely related to this disease.
In summary, my confidence comes from, 1. being an expert in a closely related field and understanding what other people are missing and above all, why they are missing it, 2. having a mechanistic model 3. finding publications that manifest similar opinions.
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