Reddit reviews Trust Us We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future

“You think that if a scientist says so, it must be true? In the early 1990s, tobacco companies secretly paid thirteen scientists a total of $156,000 to write a few letters to influential medical journals. One biostatistician received $10,000 for writing a single, eight-paragraph letter that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. A cancer researcher received $20,137 for writing four letters and an opinion piece to the Lancet, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, and the Wall Street Journal. Nice work if you can get it, especially since the scientists didn't even have to write the letters themselves. Two tobacco-industry law firms were available to do the actual drafting and editing.” https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Us-Were-Experts-Manipulates/dp/1585421391

That's a lot of bullshit that has been fed to us by these companies over the years. Read this amazing book > Trust Us We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science And Gambles With Your Life. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1585421391

What's your problem with Ibrahim exactly? Is it the fact that he documents persecution of christians in the muslim world? Are those the "unsubstantiated stories" you allude to?

Again, you're not making an argument, you're just throwing around associations and assertions. Ibrahim, fake, fatwa, propaganda, ubsubstantiated, wreckless, "uncredible." Your post is peppered with these words, yet they are just assertions.

This whole thing about experts is something I reject outright. If someone is not lying and is approaching a subject honestly and actually making an argument, then why should we not listen to them? Particularly when they are not merely asserting something, but making an argument. When so-called "experts" like Aslan argue with Harris, they don't make arguments, they simply hold their expertise over Harris' head, and keep pointing to Harris' lack of "expertise" as a way to discredit him without addressing his points. It's like a bat they hit people over the head with.

If we are only to listen to so-called experts, then who is the expert who decided that you need to be an expert before you are worth listening to? Who is the expert who decides who is an expert and who is not? Do you need to have expertise in social philosophy or in discourse in order to say that we should listen to experts, and not to regular people? People often point out that someone does not have expertise, like you did, but what is their expertise for diagnosing lack of expertise? What is their expertise for saying that we should not listen to anyone except those with expertise? And what is your expertise that allows you to say that we should listen to people based on their level of expertise?

I'm just not down with the whole culture of expert-worship.

It's not that I don't believe anyone has more expertise than somebody else, but when I see no actual argument, only mere appeals to expertise, it literally says nothing to me. Expertise is not a trump card to pull out when you have no argument to make. It's just an argument from authority.

http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Us-Were-Experts-Manipulates/dp/1585421391