Trust In Experts Quotes

When income level is the most important division in a society, politics is a struggle over how to redistribute money. When a society is more divided by education, politics becomes a war over values and culture. In country after country, people differ by education level on immigration, gender issues, the role of religion in the public square, national sovereignty, diversity, and whether you can trust experts to recommend a vaccine.

There has been a subtler but very far-reaching change: the decline of respect for expertise. Americans once accepted with little question the views of experts… The experts tended to speak with one voice, and they enjoyed a reputation as neutral specialists and servants of the general welfare.

There's branches of science which I don't understand; for example, physics. It could be said, I suppose, that I have faith that physicists understand it better than I do.

Experts must read the patterns and judge their usefulness as evidence. Under any of numerous pressures, an expert may wish to misread a pattern or even to alter it. Americans had a touching trust in "experts".

I have learned to have more faith in the scientist than he does in himself.

One hallmark of our era is the collapse of public trust in government and experts of all kinds. But it’s hard to fault the public when so many experts and their policies have failed in such spectacular fashion. The inflation that progressives helped to cause, failed to anticipate, and then ignored is one more example of earned public distrust.

Doubt is a cardinal virtue in the sciences, which advance through skeptics’ willingness to question the experts. But it can be disastrous in public health, where lives depend on people’s willingness to trust those same experts.

I have never seen a proton or electron spinning around it. I have never actually seen a chromosome. I trust that they exist because people who I trust tell me they do.

I do whatever the vets tell me to do.

Most of what we know we don't really know first hand. I've never seen a cancer cell. But I trust this community of experts who have, so I believe that cancer exists. But we trust these experts, and we trust that the experts have a system of checks and balances and self-correction. And we have to insist that experts have certain certifications. They're not perfect. Every once in awhile there's an engine falls off the wing of a plane, or a tax audit happens and you find out your expert made a mistake. But it's a pretty good system. It's the best system we've got.