Discernment in 2021: Biblical Principles for Selecting Sources

Too much in your last post to deal with at once, but I’ll hit some highlights.

Are we qualitatively different at age 12, 22, and 52? I’d say absolutely yes, and the difference is wisdom, not just amount of knowledge (quantitatively different). Someone who is 1 (maybe even through 4-5, although there are massive changes there as well) has no way to be able to judge the quality of the information they are receiving. Those that have gained more wisdom and experience do, and often with a fair amount of accuracy.

Does our judgment of someone’s expertise depend on what’s at stake? Absolutely, but there’s often more than one factor. If the risk is just a little skin, as you put it, then there’s not much risk in trusting what the doctor says about the melanoma and having it immediately removed. If he told you you were going to lose your whole nose, for example, you might want a 2nd (or even 3rd) opinion on just immediately removing what he claims is the affected area.

Arrogance. Will we always recognize when something seems off from what we are being told? No, of course not, but again, the decision not to trust something that sounds wrong is not just arrogance — the little voice telling us that something is wrong is something that most of us have learned to listen to over long years of experience. And yes, that works differently for someone our age as opposed to a 1-year old with no experience. But listening to that voice and making a different decision from the expert is not necessarily just arrogance.

We trust experts all the time. Yes we do, but again I’d argue it’s similar to the doctor with the melanoma. If I take my car in to a shop I usually use and all of a sudden they tell me that a repair I had spec’d out at say, $1000, is actually going to be $5000, they’d better do some detailed explanation or I’m going to check with more than one expert before I necessarily take what they say at face value. If the yard guy wants to treat my yard for dandelions, but in return, I’m going to have at least a year of dead grass, I’m going to want to weigh the different factors.

Finally, consensus on masks. I shouldn’t even have to say this since it’s been obvious in the news over the past year, but the direction has been contradictory, and we now have a year’s worth of numbers to see that Covid is not what was originally predicted, and that lockdown and forced mask policies haven’t made the difference that was claimed. Seeing actual evidence should make anyone old enough to have learned how to think start questioning when 2.2 million U.S. deaths were predicted and we now have 500,000, that something is really off. Is 500,000 still bad? Sure, so we then look at risk categories. I’m no disease expert, but I can see the numbers for the past year, and I can make my own judgment about how much risk I wish to take. It’s that simple. Honestly right now, I wish I did live in SD, since it’s clear that not implementing all the worst case precautions has not turned that state into a Covid Armageddon, and they’ve kept their economy alive. Obviously, there are differences, like population density, between SD and NY, but that’s just more information for me to consider. Where I live now is in between those two extremes, so I am making some different personal decisions about being careful than I would make should I live in either NY or SD.

You’re absolutely right that sometimes we should trust the experts. However, contrary to your point of view, both human nature and what I see in our culture now makes the default setting for me to be distrust, not trust. When I was little, I often heard the expression “In God we trust, all others pay cash.” I didn’t really understand that then, but now, I understand it more each year.

BTW, your example of lawn weed management is an interesting one for me personally. At my previous home, we used a lawn maintenance company. They were one with an excellent reputation, and a lot of very happy customers. I chose to use them for my yard. For about 5 years, I got great service from them, and my yard looked great. One year, something they did killed my entire yard. And it wasn’t just me. About 10-15 other homes in my neighborhood had the exact same thing happen. I never found out if it was an idiot who did the yard servicing, or wrongly marked chemicals (my theory), or what. However, something had happened to put a dent in my trust.

They took good care of me, and for over a year did everything to restore my lawn without cost to me. However, it was almost 1.5 years before my lawn looked good again. After that, my wife and I always asked them about what they were putting on the yard when they called to let us know that service was coming. Did we understand any more about what each specific chemical did to the yard? No, not at all. However, we no longer had the same amount of trust, and we hoped that them telling us and giving more explanation might make them be more careful.

Since then, we’ve moved, and I chose to use them again at my new home. However, I still want to know exactly what is going in to each application, and I’ve already once called them out to do an evaluation after something didn’t look right following an application. I’m still not an expert in yard chemicals, nor do I play one on TV, but I stay much more in tune with what is happening and question more. Is that arrogance? I don’t think so. It’s just that experience has taught me to not just simply trust.

I could give further personal examples from medical treatment, car repair, bad sermons, etc. And I’m sure I’m not the only one that has learned to trust less after being burned.

[Aaron Blumer]

We’re mostly saying the same thing, I think.

[…]

The attitude that I don’t need to depend on anybody. […] “I am qualified to judge the truth of any claim, no matter how specialized the claim might be.” And this is the arrogance part I’m pushing back on.

I guess this is where the core of our disagreement, such as it is, lies. While I don’t feel I’m necessarily qualified to “judge the truth of any claim…,” I’m still responsible for judging the truth of every claim that affects me, nonetheless, unless I am willing to do as your opposite person does — pick an authority and just do what they say. When the logical result of trusting that expert causes really consequential and/or expensive changes (like cutting off a major body part to stop cancer, or shutting down massive amounts of business in an attempt to stop an illness), I can’t simply just throw up my hands, and say “Well, I’m not an expert, and he claims to be, so…”

So what do we do when we are unqualified, but it’s a topic we need to at least partially understand? We find other experts, research what we can find written about the topic, talk with others who have also had to do this judgment, etc. In short, we try to find a way to give us enough information, even though we won’t be expert, to be able to make some kind of judgment.

To use the current Covid mess as an example, back last year, I was pretty much OK with getting behind the “two weeks to flatten the curve” initiative, as I think most people were. The idea wasn’t that the virus could be stopped, but that we would accept some temporary restrictions in order to let hospitals and medical professionals prepare so we wouldn’t be overrun. For such a relatively inexpensive and reasonable-sounding restriction, with pretty large benefits, I didn’t need to do more than trust the experts recommending such.

As a deacon in my church, however, tasked with helping to keep our church functioning during all this, when all of a sudden those “two weeks” turned into something indefinite, with no endgame in sight, for a disease that while deadly, was not the death sentence of an airborne rabies or ebola, and a supposed goal (stopping everything that could result in even a single death) that seemed frankly both utopian and authoritarian, I had to start educating myself. When stores started restricting certain items but not others, and big box stores could stay open, but mom and pop shops could not, and churches could not meet for any reason, even though AA and similar were OK, I had to start considering whether what we were facing was a result of “expertise” or whether it was something else. My suspicions were heightened when doctors started recommending different treatment regimens to help slow or mitigate the disease, and their recommendations were not just countered by the “experts,” but deleted from the internet wherever possible, so they could not be heard. This was no longer doing science, where many options and solutions to a problem were tried and considered, and contrary evidence is considered and discarded if shown to be wrong, not just “disappeared” as if it never existed. This was something else completely. I was expected to trust those “experts” who still had a voice, and completely disregard those out of favor with Pravda.

To your point — am I qualified to judge medical treatments for Covid? No, of course not, and I recognize that. Am I qualified to make judgments about actions to take for myself when experts disagree (like about school reopening) after seeing months (and now a year) of actual numbers? Yes, I believe I am. And so are most other adults. They just have to exercise the skills and knowledge they do have, and not just trust that whatever comes from the authorities MUST be correct. And when they can see the active suppression of competing points of view, everyone’s nonsense detectors should be going into overdrive.

For the past couple of decades, I’ve noticed what seems to be an increasing rate at which “the experts” say and do things which are not simply contested by other experts in the field, but are contested by more basic principles accessible to all of us. For example, around 2005, a MN study purporting to “prove” that abstinence based sex ed didn’t work did not even contain a statistical test or any attempt at a control. In short, it wasn’t a comparison at all, but rather a measurement with no attempt to put it into perspective.

When I put together an admittedly imperfect control, I found about 98% confidence of the opposite conclusion. (hey, it’s what I’ve done a lot for a living, Six Sigma is not just for factories and businesses)

Along the same lines, when “experts” like Dr. Fauci don’t seem to have anything to say about the practice of sending COVID infectees back into nursing homes before they’re cleared, I’ve got to wonder what else he really doesn’t understand. You miss the basics, please don’t expect me to trust you on things that are more complex.

And that’s why I come down very hard on the side of “real experts provide outside evidence for their claims.” That’s how academia works, and quite frankly, that’s how Aaron’s example of farming works. Someone tells me that they need to plow 9” deep for such and such a crop or some such thing, I can ask them how they know that, and by and large, they’ve got a bulletin from the county ag extension, quite possibly a degree in agricultural management and references from that, and very likely counsel from a crop management service that provides certain capital like planters and combines. Then they’ve got their state farming magazine and the like. Lots of outside resources are used by the people who actually manage to stay in the business.