On trusting experts, climate change research, and scientific translators

Stephanie Tai has written a thoughtful response on Jordan Ellenberg’s blog to my discussion with Jordan regarding trusting experts (see my Nate Silver post and the follow-up post for more context).

Trusting experts

Stephanie asks three important questions about trusting experts, which I paraphrase here:

1. What does it take to look into a model yourself? How deeply must you probe?
2. How do you avoid being manipulated when you do so?
3. Why should we bother since stuff is so hard and we each have a limited amount of time?

I must confess I find the first two questions really interesting and I want to think about them, but I have a very little patience with the last question.

Here’s why:

• I’ve seen too many people (individual modelers) intentionally deflect investigations into models by setting them up as so hard that it’s not worth it (or at least it seems not worth…