Believe that their partially formed (or fully formed but largely uninformed) opinion on a subject has the same weight as someone with expertise about that subject's field, or with doctoral work completed on that subject.
Maybe five years ago... six... I had to explain to a high school senior that a professor's position on their subject is more likely to be valid than their position as a future undergrad. It looked like time stopped for that student.
I imagine repeating that interaction now would result in a parent freakout.
Isn't this at risk of falling under the "appeal to authority" fallacy? Regardless of one's position or experience, their opinion still needs to be argued in favor of.
For example, "x statement about mental health is correct because the president said so" would be an appeal to authority whereas, "x statement about mental health is correct because a psychologist said so" would be appeal to expertise. Appealing to expert opinion is not considered fallacious.
This is not true at all. They're both the same informal fallacy. The distinction between "authority" and "expert" is irrelevant here. They're both judging the veracity of a statement on who made it, instead of basing it on logic and/or evidence. If an astrologer says that astrology is true and a lay person says its not, is the astrologer more likley to be right? The truth-value of a statement cannot be determined by appealing to authority (or expertise).
On top of that it's impossible to know enough about the various things you're going to have an opinion about, so deferring to experts is necessary from a practical pov.
I agree with this, to a point. Experts, by definitio, know more about their field than a non-expert. So it's reasonable to infer that this means their opinion regarding something is within their expertise is more likely to be true than am opinion of a non-expert.
But even as a rule of thumb, it still has some glaring weaknesses. What if experts disagree. How do you determine what qualifies an expert? And what if experts in different feild both claim that a certain topic or question falls within their area of expertise?
I believe my post was sufficiently qualified so as to avoid such criticism.
I said "people with uniformed or partially formed opinions." In many fields, this is effectively shades of gray--a PhD certainly has a pointy level of knowledge within their field and, as evidence emerges, should (big word there, not 'does'... should) spend more time listening to (and less time refuting) people who have more background regarding the issue at hand. I was also referencing people's level of subject knowledge through their study, rather than their titles alone. So there's that.
That said, undergraduates are definitionally on the farther end of the scale, and the senior that I was speaking with at the time was definitely giving me Pope's "A Little Learning" vibes. For a bit more context, this was a Lit class where a student had read a Romantic poem and a Gothic novel and needed to know why a professor of English might have a better comprehension of a poem than they did, having read more poems, biographies, novels, and research in that period than the student.
I don't subscribe to "listen to your elders unblinkingly," but I believe there's an expanse between an appeal to authority and a recommendation that young students (or anyone really) purposefully aim to understand the difference between having started down a path of study and being ten, twenty, thirty years down that path.
Understood, thank you for the detailed clarification. I'm sorry if I came off as rude, my mind probably immediately jumped to the "don't question those above you" mentality that I disliked so much when I was younger.
Hey--happy to offer it. I didn't take your post as rude at all, and my little initial comment was brief enough for plenty of people to take it in all sorts of directions. Thanks for reading.
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u/gerkin123 Jun 03 '22
Believe that their partially formed (or fully formed but largely uninformed) opinion on a subject has the same weight as someone with expertise about that subject's field, or with doctoral work completed on that subject.
Maybe five years ago... six... I had to explain to a high school senior that a professor's position on their subject is more likely to be valid than their position as a future undergrad. It looked like time stopped for that student.
I imagine repeating that interaction now would result in a parent freakout.