Don't just "trust the experts" - Become well informed.

I'm really tired of the "trust the experts" rhetoric. It really just translates to "trust authority" and serves as excuse to not make your own argument.

The first response to that statement should always be "Which experts?" You usually won't get a good response. People who are honest will say, "The experts with whom I agree."

The problem is that there's no amount of intelligence or schooling which prevents us from being wrong or believing weird things. There are people with credentials in economics who fall across the political spectrum. How many people read Capital in the 21st Century and declared that they're listening to an expert while ignoring that the book was largely dismissed by other experts in the field?

We have limited knowledge and a limited time to gain more. That goes for all of us. The important thing for everybody to know is that science is a process that doesn't end and that we're constantly finding new evidence that changes our way of looking at the world. Sometimes the belief that was once fringe turns out to be likely true.

What we can all say regarding experts is that we should learn from them. There are millions of people in the world who have better training in science than most of us, including me. But, that's not to say that we have to take what they're telling us for granted or that we can't form our own perspectives after we learn.