What do we already have right?

EndlessStrategy

I was just wondering. Human minds are messed up in 1001 ways, but are there a few rational principles that most people already have down? Of course, the answers to this question are probably so extremely obvious that I haven't even considered them. But I ask all the same.

On the other hand, choosing the right experts is a huge problem in and of itself.

Eh, choosing people who have academic credentials (from major establishments) in the topic in question should bring you close enough to the truth (or at least, as close as you can be without putting in at least as much work as they did). Sure, you'll get it wrong sometimes (listening to theologians on religion), but it's likely to be more correct than trusting your own judgement, or than trusting experts from the wrong domain (physicists talking about diet, biologists talking about cosmology, science fiction authors talking about consciousness, etc.).

Yeah, usually that works pretty well.

1Brillyant13y

I think there is value in listening to theologians on religion. The annoying mistake is made when proponents of a religion cite theologians as evidence of their presupposition of god's existence. Just because they can tell us about every nook and cranny of a particular religious tradition doesn't mean they have anything useful to say about if said religious tradition relates to reality.

3ChristianKl13y

Academic knowledge if often pretty narrow. Recently I was searching for a way of describing human movement. It turns out that while biologists do have large controlled vocabularies for describing spiders, I couldn"t find a controlled vocabulary for the task that's done by good biologists. It seems that the frameworks that are out there were done by dance theorists and aren"t well updated to the 21st century. And by that I mean it"s not trival to express everything in an XML file. If you want to know which genes express which proteins than biologists are the right people to ask. On the other hand there a lot in biology, where biologists don"t know very much.