Note there is a whole class of basic problems where it is possible to verify or falsify a solution quickly, but not come up with as solution yourself.
Part of this 'trust experts' meme is that : most human beings on earth are not sufficiently trained to venture an opinion that should be taken seriously on complex subjects like ethics.
But, it is trivially easy for anyone with even basic math to check an ethicist's decision, and see when it is lethally bad. [for example, by declaring challenge trials unethical or the mask debacle]
The issue with this is that when regular citizens check the official advice, find it is incoherent and wrong, then because they are not a credentialed expert they are disallowed from having their criticism even looked at for correctness. Note that doctors frequently make medical errors, and when their patients check the decision and find it to be obviously wrong, they have difficulty getting their criticism acknowledged as valid.
How can you check proof of any interesting statement about real world using only math? The best you can do is check for mathematical mistakes.
"what do they claim to know and how do they know it"
No amount of credentials or formal experience makes an expert not wrong if they do not have high quality evidence, that they have shown, to get their conclusions from. And an algorithm formally proven to be correct that they show they are using.
Or in the challenge trials : ethicist claims to value human life. A challenge trial only risks the lives of a few people, where even if they die it would have saved hundreds of thousands.
In this case the " basic math" is one of multiplication and quantities, showing the "experts" don't know anything. As you might notice, ethicists do not have high quality information as input to generate their conclusions from. Without that information you cannot expect more than expensive bullshitting.
"Ethics" today is practiced by reading ancient texts and more modern arguments, many of which have cousins with religion. But ethics is not philosophy. It is actually a math problem. Ultimately, there are things you claim to value ("terminal values"). There are actions you can consider doing. Some actions have an expected value that with a greater score on the things you care about, and some actions have a lesser expected value.
Any other action but taking the one with the highest expected value (factoring in variance), is UNETHICAL.
Yes, professional ethicists today are probably mostly all liars and charlatans, no more qualified than a water douser. I think EY worked down to this conclusion in a sequence but this is the simple answer.
One general rule of thumb if you didn't read the above: if an expert claims to know what they are doing, look at the evidence they are using. I don't know the anatomy of the human body enough to gainsay an orthopedic surgeon, but I'm going to trust the one that actually looks at a CT scan over one that palpates my broken limb and reads from some 50 year old book. Doesn't matter if the second one went to the most credible medical school and has 50 years experience.
But ethics is not philosophy. It is actually a math problem.
Engineering. (You're also making assumptions about shoulds, which might not hold in general, but I don't think I disagree with here.**)
Any other action but taking the one with the highest expected value (factoring in variance), is UNETHICAL.
Variance and /knowledge. I.e. maximize expected value (optimize!*), /or minimize risk from being incorrect (robust!).
*As it is commonly used.
**What is right, may be a complicated question. Less people dying, though - this seems right. Though I haven't done a cost benefit analysis. And maybe those ethicists didn't either.
In this case the ” basic math” is one of multiplication and quantities, showing the “experts” don’t know anything
Or they have reason to think that utilitarianism is not entirely correct.
Ultimately, there are things you claim to value (“terminal values
So is objective value based on what I value, or on what you do? You are confusing with personal utility maximisation with utilitarianism.
Yes, professional ethicists today are probably mostly all liars and charlatans
Maybe, but you're no longer in a position where you can complain about how people treat you.
I am saying a person who chooses an action that kills thousands of people and claims it to be ethical is probably not ethical.
(FDA delaying vaccine approvals)
Unless you can show that that was something to do with the majority of professional ethicists , you have changed the subject.
“I'm an expert in right and wrong”? That doesn't sound like a real thing to me.
In theory, I can imagine a person collecting examples of frequent ethical problems, their frequently proposed answers, and possible consequences of those answers. Like a person who would immediately try to see what perverse incentives some rule creates, what slippery slopes exist in given situation (preferably with historical examples of what actually happened), possible second-order effects (again, with historical examples), etc.
Today, such specialization would probably be some combination of ethics, economics, and history.
When I heard this, I was simply confused at how unexamined Matt's position was.
The idea of being an expert on ethics is something the Rationalist is community quite familiar with. Effective Altruism, in general, assumes that an EA mode of moral behavior is in fact something one can develop an expertise in. Perhaps you have different values than EA, but even so, whatever your values, there can be more or less effective ways of achieving them, an expert is just someone who has mapped the tensions and conflicts and contradictions involved in thinking about the territory clearly.
It seems to me that there are many different complaints being raised:
A) Experts in specific things were treated as general authorities.
A lot of what we get is adjacent expertise. So somebody who studies viruses, and maybe knows a lot about the protein structure of viruses, will opine about masks, right... They didn't have expertise in those areas, and were in fact just on a par with me, or anybody else, right? But they had the, sometimes, arrogance that comes with believing you're being asked about your area of expertise.
B) People have differing moral values about what is a good result.
We're just talking about, what is a fair and reasonable way to prioritize different people over each other?
C) The arguments and decisions being made aren't actually being made by the real experts, they are being made by pseudo-experts.
And I'm like, "Well, according to whom?" Right? Obviously in consequentialist terms, it’s good ethics. I happened to know the top expert in Kantian ethics, she thinks that's a good idea. So, who the fuck are you?
I think these complaints are not incompatible with some people being experts at reasoning about ethics. It seems like what's happening (I certainly have never observed "bioethics Twitter" so I am just guessing) is that random people are rationalizing their beliefs by appealing to random prestigious or powerful people and calling them the "experts" to whom you should defer all judgment, and then Julia and Matt are pushing back on that whole general dynamic.
I recently collected excerpts from 33 random bioethics papers from 2014–2020, plus 10 papers from 2000, in the hope of getting a better picture of what the field is like, how healthy it is, and what its social effects may be.
One of the conversations that prompted me to look into this was Julia Galef's Feb. 3, 2021 interview of Matt Yglesias. The exchange is interesting in its own right, so I've copied it below. The relevant discussion pivots from the Iraq War to COVID-19: