Related: A Sketch of Good Communication, Argument, intuition & recursion

Your friend is wrong, but you look like the crackpot. They might be studying the PhD in climate science, but you're deferring to world-renowned climate expert, Prof. Knows-a-Lot! And yet everyone's looking at you weirdly ... You feel like Morgan that time they tried to argue with Lisa. Even though Lisa works for the IMF and Morgan had sort-of read an interview with Nobel-winning economist ...

I think it's likely that the friend with the PhD has the right of the matter, and the friend with the global expert in their corner has it wrong. I mostly think that because often, experts didn't say what we think they said. That is, we misunderstood them. And this is less likely to happen in a direct conversation.

It feels like we should be able to absorb expert opinions and shortcut to correctness on many matters. And fortunately we have access to the views of many top experts: whether books, lectures or editorials, the considered views of the elite are available to the masses. But what to do in a case like the vignette at the beginning of this post: we confront another, lesser expert who assures us we are wrong. Maybe not even wrong, but fundamentally confused! It feels like we can't just flip-flop on our views whenever we hear of a disagreeing expert. Why on earth should we prefer an expert that's close to us in space over one that's far but preeminent? A plausible approach is to stick with the higher status expert.

But then, as I alluded to above, we've also all seen the other side of that. And it doesn't seem like the one quoting the expert is implementing a truth-tracking strategy. A possibility is that we're just responding to status markers. But I think there are good reasons to be sceptical of expert-quoting as an epistemic strategy.

Ideally, we'd like to find out the consensus position. We might not be able to go toe-to-toe with an expert we meet on the road, but at least we can say "I grant that you understand the situation better than I do, but a poll of economists found that 80% disagree with what you're saying now. So I'll assume that's true, even though I can't see a flaw in your argument". Sometimes we might not be able to research consensus in the timeframe in which we need to act. More commonly, consensus is just not available. So we need to figure out what to do wit...

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