Experts are also prone to reducing complex phenomena to single-factor causes – factors which happen to align with their own expertise. But complex phenomena are rarely understood through such reductionism, just as most problems have many contributing causes, and the root cause may not be the obvious one or the one that confirms one’s personal or professional biases. Attempting to manipulate a complex phenomenon through one or two simplified variables is a recipe for unexpected if not chaotic outcomes.
— Avery Easton
Category: Avery Easton Quotes
Avery Easton on Pontificators
Those who passionately pontificate about something they don’t fully understand or haven’t put sufficient thought into will, when pressed to articulate their thoughts, bluster about the obviousness of it all and assert that there is no need for them to explain: ‘You know what I mean!’
Perhaps you do. But why should you have to fill in their blanks? Why should you have to make sense of what they are unable to articulate, or read between the lines what they are too cowardly to state explicitly?
It’s not up to you to do the work of understanding their ideas for them, let alone make those ideas workable where they can or will not.
— Avery Easton
Avery Easton on Theories
There is always the danger with any theory of finding it so flattering to one’s personal biases and convenient to one’s personal interests that one applies it even where it doesn’t work.
— Avery Easton
Avery Easton on Infallibility
People who revere ‘experts’ never consider whether the years of study and practice they view as ‘credentializing’ a given expert may have been in the service of ideas or doctrines or schools of thought which are factually incorrect or even morally abhorrent. Error doesn’t become infallibility through perseverance.
– Avery Easton
Avery Easton on Scientific Mindsets
Having a scientific mindset – embracing skepticism, rationality, empiricism, etc. – does not mean accepting every idea or policy claiming to be based in science or endorsed by scientific experts, while dismissing out of hand any disagreement or alternative proposals as “anti-scientific” or “science denialism”.
That isn’t science, it’s cultism.
One can easily recognize this cultism in how the response to these supposedly scientific ideas or policies is accompanied by extravagant condescension, histrionic outrage, punitive spite, and other affects at odds with the objective and dispassionate pursuit of knowledge about reality.
— Avery Easton
Avery Easton on Challenging Experts
The expert’s claim to authority is his superior knowledge and skill in his particular sphere. Second-guessing him calls into question his legitimacy as an expert, and thus his claim on authority.
The solutions to this were straightforward: make it socially and intellectually uncouth to challenge experts (by labelling such questioning as “misinformation”, “conspiracy theory”, “anti-science”, or the like), and stop providing the layman with the information and thinking skills necessary for him to form and articulate such challenges.
— Avery Easton