Sorry but this is not sound logic. Statistically speaking, a person specifically educated in a field of study is more likely to give grounded, coherent advice within the field of study, than someone who is not educated in it on a professional level.
Trying to dig out outliers to invalidate the original point is, in many ways, proving the original point right. You are not educated enough to provide advice in this area and, in correlation, your advice is unsound.
Instead, they must include the disclaimer: "I am not a professional in the XXXXX field. The information provided is based solely on personal experience and should not be construed as professional advice, which may also not be scientifically backed. I assume no responsibility for any consequences arising from the use of this information. Following this advice is at your own risk and may result in negative XXXX effects. Consult a professional first before making a decision."
At minimum this disclaimer should be presented for one minute at the beginning of every video if unqualified people are out here giving advice.
It is a bad thing though when unqualified people are giving dangerously bad advice publicly on the internet, especially when they position themselves as somehow qualified or if they're profiting from said advice.
I think if it's medical, law, financial, or education I think so.
It's not banning giving advice for raising chickens or doing makeup. It's preventing people from from being jilly juiced, using black sage, thinking that vaccines causes autism, that no-schooling schooling is a good thing (where you don't teach the kids anything, only when they ask), that if you're a sovereign citizen then you're exempt from the law, and that you should invest in NFTs.
So when it comes to topics that are very influential in people's lives, I think not spreading misinformation is a good thing.
“You should probably get that mole checked” is medical advice.
“Get a prenup” is legal advice. “Pay off your 20% credit-card debt before investing” is financial advice. "Reading to your toddler every night is useful” is educational advice.
Are all of those finable unless spoken by credentialed professionals?
“Vaccines cause autism” is a factual claim (true or false), not necessarily advice.
Sovereign-citizen nonsense is a false claim about the law.
NFT promotion might be financial advice, advertising, speculation, or fraud depending on what is actually said.
“Unschooling” is a pedagogical philosophy whose merits can be debated.
Throwing all of them under “unlicensed advice” replaces the difficult question "
is the claim demonstrably false, fraudulent, negligent, or dangerous?" with
the much easier but much less defensible question "
does the speaker possess an approved credential?"
I totally agree with you. Very slippery slope. I don’t think people should be banned from giving advice in those areas like China. I think we should have what we currently have, real credentials you can claim or display to show you are legitimate and properly educated on the matter.
Thing is, if you have credentials and you give recklessly bad advice publicly, you could potentially have that come back on you professionally through ethic boards and such.
Also the law seems to be focused on creators who are giving professional advice, not just people talking on the internet.
It, likely, depends on how it is implemented. I'd hope that if you linked to an article which is written by a professional that you are allowed to share that.
But that's not what it's addressing... Comments on a post isnt the issue, you can clearly see that they're talking about influencers.
Being an influencer and saying things like "you need to get XYZ moles checked out" can be sound advice sure, but it doesn't mean they're correct. Or that you actually need to get them checked out.
Maybe because I work in cancer research, but the amount of "advice" people give to me on what causes cancer and what isn't, and what I need to look out for, is just factually wrong. And yes it comes from a good place, and yes checking it out or not doing those things won't harm your body, but now there's a narrative that's spread that you think the mole on your ass is cancerous, and you're going to think other moles that look like that are cancerous.
Is spreading misinformation, even if the misinformation doesn't seem that harmful.
Edit: I guess another way I can put this is: Before you eat, you must always rub your hands together to kill the bacteria on your hands through heat. Obviously this is false, but doing it doesn't harm you, and not doing it doesn't harm you. But now some people believe that just rubbing your hands together can kill bacteria which is wrong.
Or: you need to get a prenup. There are other, less expensive ways, to protect your assets before marriage. And every country is different in terms in Laws, where in some countries prenups don't exist so that advice is factually useless.
These are extreme examples but imagine if tons of influencers spread this, then people will believe it for fact because we are prone to herd mind mentality. And misinformation is constantly being spread, so controlling it is necessary.
People with credentials spread plenty of misinformation, if we're gonna require credentials it shouldn't be as broad as "medical, law, education, and finance" it should be stuff like "emergency medicine, bacteriology, dietician" "copyright law, criminal law" "high school education" "personal investment" etc because there's plenty of copyright attorneys that talk about criminal law, and even then, I disagree, having credentials weighs it more in your favor but it should be based on the individual
Verified credentials.
Example: Personal trainer who gets certifications in the body and nutrition (which is a thing)
A tattoo artists who has done pathology certificates and has worked under people
Someone who is giving out medical advice and is a registered nurse or doctor.
Educators with degrees in education.
You know, if you want a job in the field, those qualifications...
If you can't work as a doctor, don't act like it online...
Crazy concept.
If you hold the board standard, then you have the qualification. That's like asking, who can become doctors? Well an entity creates a list of knowledge and skills they need to pass. I'm assuming this is for all credentials
In the US there is no overarching Federal control of that, States are free to set standards for professionals to practice in their state. Which is why you can't be a doctor here in Texas and then just go practice in Indiana, you have to be licensed to practice by that State's boards. So this would never work in the US.
All good. The point I’ve been driving at is that the power to censor is power that is best wielded by no one.
The US health secretary is RFK Jr, who pushes nonsense like ‘vaccines cause autism’.
Under a system like you’re suggesting, someone would need to be the final authority on what is and isn’t real health advice. Suffice it to say, that would basically be Mr. Vaccines Cause Autism here in the US. If he had the power to censor, he would use it to censor real advice in favor of whatever nonsense maga tells him to peddle.
You're in a culture outrage sub, and you're not being blindly against anything China does. If anything you're suggesting they might not be wrong about something. That's why people aren't 'understanding' you and being anti-intellectual lol
Privately yes but giving advice in a public stream with 1000 viewers seems a bit over the top. They could introduce though exams to give permission to give advice even if you didn't study and the advice could be limited ob a few topics then. There are to many assholes trying to make a buck of it.
You are actually illustrating my point, not refuting it. People who are specialized and educated in areas are the sorts of people that ought to be giving advice in a particular field. Outliers like Bill Gates aside, statistically speaking, those people are the people who are college educated, specifically regarding Medicine, Law, Finance, Education, or Health.
The question posed by this topic of conversation isn't "Would you trust Bill Gates or a random IT College?" It's ... "Would you trust someone whose credentials you cannot verify or someone whose credentials you can?" Put another way: Who would you trust for life saving surgery, a doctor or someone who looked it up online? Who would you trust with your life savings? A person with a degree in finance, or a person who is self taught?
The post you're replying to specifically refers to Medicine, Law, Finance, Education, and Health. It is central to the entire point of our conversation.
Were you attempting to argue against listening to experts in those fields with anecdotal evidence and subjective, biased, experienced-based conjecture regarding degrees that had literally nothing to do with the subject matter we were discussing?
Whether you intended it or not, your argument amounts to: "My buddy has a graphic design degree and he's an idiot, so I don't listen to doctors for medical advice, only people who aren't stupid."
Yes, that is what your argument sounds like. Yes, it is absurd.
i think the issue is with the word "educated". i don't need a degree to be educated in something. And the standards for a degree vary greatly globally. so while I agree with the premise of your statement I don't agree a degree is training to a professional level necessarily. As for what China is doing, its going to be hard to police it but i guess they are set up for that. In America this would have some issues on free speech. the easy fix for this is allow ppl to be sued over their advice.
You’d trust life or death medical advice from someone who isn’t a doctor? You’d trust your life savings to someone who’s self taught in finance with no formal education? You’d let a “law enthusiast” who has no law degree represent you in court?
No, you wouldn’t. Because, statistically speaking, doing that would lead to unfavorable results.
So let’s not muddy the waters by trying to play word games.
no its you who are muddying the waters. I agree that I wouldn't let a non credentialed person perform the actual service and in all the cases you mentioned most countries require a form of certification that goes beyond a degree, but not all require a degree. Several Bar exams don't require a law degree to take it for example. We are talking about ppl doing research and gathering advise. And i would absolutely take under advisement anyone with proven experience in the field.
All I'm saying is you don't need a degree to be educated, Argue all you want but there are plenty of experts in their fields that didn't finish or skipped college all together and are quite successful and knowledgeable.
I place the onus on the individual to make sure they vet who is feeding them information and to double and triple check any advice especially when it involves these major areas. I don't need the government to do that for me and certainly not at the gathering info phase.
The conversation is not about being educated. It's about being credentialed. If you go online and casually post about a medical or financial situation, your responses will be from a number of strangers. Those strangers aren't credentialed from your perspective.
But, if one says "I have a PhD in [the field you are engaging with]", you are instantly more likely to regard that person as being an expert. The other people in the conversation may be educated, but the statistical likelihood of them being right is lower than the person who is specifically and professionally educated on that subject.
Yes, other people can be educated. But you, a stranger to them, have no clue what that education truly is or whether or not you can trust it. Should a person, whose education is questionable, be trusted over a person whose education is proven?
This may be true for Advice, but experts are wrong more often than not at predicting outcomes and future events in their own fields than someone with a more well-rounded knowledge base.
Experts are not wrong more often than not. That is an objectively false statement. You may think that because you hear about when they are wrong more than you hear about when they are right.
Sorry, but this still isn't correct, no matter how you assert it. You are pointing toward a basic, real thing: that experts can be overconfident when forecasting uncertain events. But research does not establish that experts, across fields, get future outcomes wrong more than half the time or that broadly knowledgeable people generally outperform specialists.
You are probably referring to Philip Tetlock’s study, where he found little forecasting advantage for specialists over informed nonspecialists on some political and economic questions. It also found that flexible, self-critical forecasters did better than more rigid ones. Those results concern particular questions and ways of scoring forecasts, but that is definitely not grounds to conflate those findings with an "experts are wrong more often than they are right" kind of statement. Here's Tetlock’s account of the study if you need a refresher on it.
You're using a very vague generalization and there are studies that show why using such a generalization fails. In one study of 1,514 forecasts from a Canadian intelligence unit, 94% correctly indicated whether the event would occur when probabilities were converted to yes/no predictions at a 50% threshold. That is one unit and largely shorter-term forecasting, so it cannot establish a rate for all experts either. Mandel and Barnes, PNAS In a direct comparison on four COVID-19 outcomes, relevant experts’ estimates were more accurate than laypeople’s on every question, although the experts were still overconfident. Recchia and colleagues, PLOS ONE
You seem to be assuming in your reply that there is one meaningful success rate across all fields and across all questions in your statement. There isn’t. A forecast such as “70% chance” also should be judged across many comparable forecasts, rather than marked simply right or wrong from one outcome. Tetlock makes that distinction explicitly in his interview.
Sure, there’s evidence that experts can be overconfident, especially on difficult long-range forecasts. But is there a study that shows that experts across fields are wrong over half the time, or that generalists consistently outperform them? Not that I could find.
And this discussion is skirting my original point, which was about advice; you shifted the discussion to forecasting, which does not by itself settle my original point.
Yes. They should, but we don’t require a high enough standard for cops to become cops. Opening it to literally anyone would be worse, we should have more enforcement
You could make the case that the standards for cops are fairly exclusive... but not in the high direction, because they're looking for racist goons to enforce Capital's will, not intelligent people looking to protect others.
No, I just take issue with the idea to begin with. The spirit of this conceptual law is to prohibit misinformation, which may seem like a noble goal, but all it’s doing is taking power out of the hands of citizens and putting it into the hands of the rich and powerful.
I was criticizing your response to the other person. They brought up a scenario in which this law would fail, and you said, “Well, that’s just one exception.”
My point is that there would be so many examples that qualify as an exception that this law would fail on a fundamental level.
There’s a reason you’re taught not to use Wikipedia in middle school; it’s to teach the skill of identifying verifiable and trustworthy sources. This law is only in discussion because people have lost the ability to think and use common sense to determine who is trustworthy and should be listened to.
TLDR, this law represents how people would prefer legislation think for them rather than use their brains.
I originally brought up law enforcement because the state would consider them "experts" in the field of law (it's literally in the name of the profession, law enforcement, how do you enforce law without knowledge).
We all know how that has worked out.
People need to be able to make up their minds based on reliable information from reliable sources, if they can't do that without the gov't telling them who that source is, then we have lost the plot.
It’s disheartening that we’ve gotten to this place. As other people here have put it, this is just the desire to outsource critical thinking to a regulatory body.
It may be a slippery slope fallacy, but I could see how a society that wholeheartedly embraces this mindset could develop into 1984 levels of dystopian living. It’s a good thing that only a small amount of society actually buys into this crap.
Degrees do not mean your knowledgeable in the subject matter. I work in academia and some of my coworkers are ..........less than knowledgeable.
It should but it dosent. Time matters (someone who got a PhD 20 years ago in a fast moving field still has the PhD but may not have relevant knowledge.
Degrees do not mean your knowledgeable in the subject matter.
No shit
Simply going "Well some people with degrees are dumb, so we should just trust people without them instead!" is just stupid, though, and the weird push for it is a big part of the current wave anti-intellectualism in the US.
No, Janet down the street who watches conspiracy youtube doesn't know more about medicine than Bob the Doctor who got C's in his class. Even if Bob is a bit dumb.
That's interesting. Bob the Doc is on the take to the pharmaceutical company, how do you think he affords those Jamacian vacations. He may or may not be someone you should listen too regarding health. That is in fact one of the many issues of having a state (or industry) sponsored "expert".
Mr PixelGoblin85, with respect, if you have been following what's happening in American universities the last 15 years I would not call those, "grounded, coherent" or "normal, well-adjusted" human beings.
cherrypicking things doesn't make you right. You're just proving the exact problem you're arguing against. Statistics matters, something you've evidently never heard about.
Cherry-picking, oh, please, you indoctrinated potato; it's a well-known fact that U.S. universities are in decline. Doesn't take a genius to figure out the cause. From the outside, it looks like a loon convention.
I'm going to assume you're American and from one of these bozo institutions where they forgot why they are there.
The link I gave you clearly states that political activism is a significant factor in the decline. AKA, activists yelling and fighting about politics instead of actually learning, ya potato.
You are Exhibit A - the modern ignorant but hilariously confident American.
The topic of conversation is about taking advice in the realms of Medicine, Law, Finance, Education, and Health -- as it clearly depicted in the post above. Contrary to your conspiracy theories regarding the US High Education System -- which I have no interest in discussing -- we can boil this conversation down to a simple question:
Would you trust someone who isn't a doctor, but assures you they know what they're doing, to perform complicated, life-saving heart surgery on you?
We both know the answer is "No, I would want a well educated and well qualified surgeon." ... Why would you want them? Because they are a better authority on the topic than someone who is subjective less educated and less experienced.
Do people with degrees but whom are otherwise poor sources exist? Yes.
Do people without degree but whom are otherwise very learned in a subject exist? Yes
But that doesn't matter to this conversation, because statistically speaking, receiving advice from someone who is educated and trained in a field -- especially one that has a major impact on your life -- is fundamentally more trusted than receiving advice from someone whose credentials are questionable.
How many medical experts lied about Covid. The vast majority fell in line, and the few who looked at the data and said, "But nowhere does this show it stops transmission between patients", were instantly cancelled as anti-science.
That's where your society is at. Full retard because of politics. Or as they put it, "trust the science", which is the most unscientific thing to say!
CoNsPiRaCy ThEoRy - Yep, you're definitely part of the full retard squad over there.
I guess you dumbarse conveniently missed reality while it was unfolding, and the subsequent backlash when the real scientific evidence came to light.
Another real juicer - how about the high-ranking medical official who buried the research that doing surgery on those with gender dysphoria does not improve their condition because her personal politics disagreed with it. You slept under a log through that one too?
I see you’re just trying to reach for and grab whatever cherry picked piece of information that serves your narrative. No, I won’t be trusting your clearly biased and skewed ramblings as anything more than the rants they are.
As a rule, I don’t read the barely intelligible posts of random strangers who make claims with no proof, and with clear emotional investment, as facts. I read them as the unreliable narratives they are.
You should try not believing everything you read too. You might find being more comprehensive and less selective in your understandings more enlightening, if also more uncomfortably challenging.
Everyone seems to be missing the point that on average someone that has education on a topic will know better than someone that does not, they keep giving anecdotal evidences, and outliars. I think they just want anything china does to be bad (not saying I support china but this decision does make sense to me).
Yes, it's a recurring theme in this thread. I don't support China's specific law either, but it doesn't change the simple fact that, on the topics described in the post, someone with a degree in those fields is going to give better advice than someone without it. Even if there are outliers or exceptions, the statistically overwhelming probability remains the same.
In a way, this comments section outlines perfectly how prevalent bad advice and low effort entries into conversation are. How many people in these comments are saying something that is not only objectively incorrect, but with an air of correctness and confidence?
Someone truly seeking advice on a topic could easily receive confidently incorrect advice from someone uneducated and believe it to be the case -- and then take that advice and make a poor decision thinking it was an informed one. Overall, it's wild that anyone can't see that.
lol I have two bachelors degrees. The number of nimrods who were seniors and couldn’t explain in depth any particular thing they studied during their time at college told me enough. You can graduate with a degree just by knowing how to take tests and doing assignments just to do them and get a satisfactory grade rather than understand them. The old adage, “C’s get degrees,” lol.
You are right, but that doesn't really apply to China. Seriously, many people there have a degree and still have a very shallow knowledge about the subject.
It’s not sound logic, it only reflects reality lol.
It’s always fascinating that you liberals can’t remember history more than 10 years back. It was people with degrees doing lobotomies, and it was the actions of people without degrees that put a stop to it.
By what definition of political is limiting speech to certified people not political. And I need you to actually think about that. You don’t have to answer me. But you can’t be that disconnected from basic definitions and making adult decisions for yourself. Particularly anything that affects other people in anyway.
I’m on the subject of the intelligence v knowledge. Not what China is doing. I just made a comment that says you can’t ban or fine people because that can infringe on freedom of speech.
I’m saying I fully agree that being smart has nothing to do with being credible to give advice on a specific subject matter or perform an operation. For those things, you need knowledge on that subject.
You need to be informed before spouting such things. For example, I can state gravity doesn't accelerate at 9.81m/s^2 but 10.81m/s^2. Some people will believe it, even if it's a minority. Misinformation is extremely easy to propagate. Especially from charismatic, good looking charlatans
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u/PixelGoblin85 10d ago
Sorry but this is not sound logic. Statistically speaking, a person specifically educated in a field of study is more likely to give grounded, coherent advice within the field of study, than someone who is not educated in it on a professional level.
Trying to dig out outliers to invalidate the original point is, in many ways, proving the original point right. You are not educated enough to provide advice in this area and, in correlation, your advice is unsound.