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JGWeissman comments on What is bunk? - Less Wrong
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I'm unimpressed by this method. First, the procedure as given does more to reinforce pre-existing beliefs and point one to people who will reinforce those beliefs than anything else. Second, the sourcing used as experts is bad or outright misleading. For example, consider global warming. Wikipedia is listed as an expert source. But Wikipedia has no expertise and is itself an attempt at a neutral summary of experts. Even worse, Conservapedia is used both on the global warming and 9-11 pages. Considering that Conservapedia is Young Earth Creationist and thinks that the idea that Leif Erickson came to the the New World is a liberal conspiracy, I don't think any rational individual will consider them to be a reliable source (and the vast majority of American right-wingers I've ever talked to about this cringe when Conservapedia gets mentioned. So this isn't even my own politics coming into play). On cryonics we have Benjamin Franklin listed as pro. Now, that's roughly accurate. But it is also clear that he was centuries too early to have anything resembling relevant expertise. Looking at many of the fringe subjects a large number of the so-called experts who are living today have no intrinsic justification for their expertise (actors are not experts on scientific issues for example). TakeOnIt seems devoted if anything to blurring the nature of expert knowledge to the point where it becomes almost meaningless. The Bayesian Conspiracy would not approve.
There is value in recording the opinions of anyone perceived as an expert by a segment of the general population, as it builds a track record for each supposed expert, so that the statistical analysis can reveal that the opinions of some so called experts are just noise, and give a result influenced mainly by the real experts.
See The Correct Contrarian Cluster.
That might work if we had major track records for people. Unfortunately for a lot of issues that could potentially matter (say the Singularity and Cryonics) we won't have a good idea who was correct for some time. It seems like a better idea to become an expert on a few issues and then see how much a given expert agrees with you in the area of your expertise. If they agree with you, you should be more likely to give credence to them in their claimed areas of expertise.
Well, I would like to see more short term predictions on TakeOnIt, where after the event in question, comments are closed, and what really happened is recorded. From this data, we would extrapolate who to believe about the long term predictions.
That might work in some limited fields (economics and technological developement being obvious ones). Unfortunately, many experts don't make short term predictions. In order for this to work one would need to get experts to agree to try to make those predictions. And they have a direct incentive not to do so since it can be used against them later (well up to a point. Psychics like Sylvia Brown make repeated wrong predictions and their followers don't seem to mind). I give Ray Kurzweil a lot of credit for having the courage to make many relatively short term predictions (many which so far have turned out to be wrong but that's a separate issue).
Yes, in some cases, there is no (after the fact) non-controversial set of issues to use to determine how effective an expert is. Which means that I can't convince the general public of how much they should trust the expert, but I can still figure out how much I should trust em by looking at their positions that I can evaluate.
There is also the possibility of saying something about such an expert based on correlations with experts whose predictions can be non-controversially evaluated.