A forum user brought this up and I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea.
Essentially, people could nominate and/or vote on who are known "Experts" in a particular field and give them an "Expert" designator tag. e.g. Analog Expert, Acoustics Expert etc.
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- I find that one, nominating experts, one of the worsts ideas.
- Any explanation that starts with a filling/emphasizing word, like "Essentially", to me is an alarm indicator, but maybe I'm too paranoiac and here is not the a case of mind conditioning.
- The most important counter argument is that
science does not work by voting. Science is not a democracy, and it is not about what people like or what people think. Science and its derivatives, like engineering, are independent of crowd's belief.
Not everything can be voted upon. Voting is about the power of many taking over everything else, including taking over correctness or truth simply by numbers, and completely disconnected from reality. There is an old saying explaining why that is bad: "A million flies can't be wrong, eat shit."
The propaganda must be terrifyingly intense these days if people are now starting to think we should vote for everything, including scientific truth, or even engineering truth.
This is to me an example of brainwashing, just like any cult is completely mind-condition its followers into believing even the most absurd claims. Keep in mind brainwashing can be intended or unintended. No matter how it came to be, nobody is immune to it, including myself. This is not about being gullible. Even the smartest people can be changed.
Oh, and all the above is not about you Dave, I'm a big admirer of your work and achievements. It's about our world today. Internet made the repetition possible very cheaply. We, as humans, were not ready for such a sudden non stop exposure to connectivity.
It's about an issue happening as we speak, IMO. I don't know if it's happening by itself or as a driven attack, but to me it is clear that it's destroying the western world and it's values.
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This is how I think it works, told as a tale about training neural networks, where the neural network is the human brain. Our minds keeps changing/learning/adapting to whatever we are exposed, whether we want it or not. This feature of continuous learning (that can not be controlled by our own will) could also turn us into brainwashed zombies.
If people are repeated the same thing over and over, no matter if that thing is good or bad, people will start obsessing about it, and will eventually start acting as if it were true, and turn it into "social norm", or a "social fact". (See for example religion).
It's like in the old saying "Anything repeated 1000 times becomes truth". Could be a screaming lie, doesn't matter, still works, the lie will be believed in the end as a true fact. But I'd like to rephrase that in terms of neural networks (NN).
A neural network is carved by the predominant signals it is exposed to.Sometimes called NN training, sometimes propaganda, or mind conditioning, or even brainwashing when the training is brutal and meant to kill the existing NN paths in order to replace them with some other desired drone behavior.
The only way to resist brainwashing and propaganda is to avoid its repetition and patterns. Even when fully aware, nobody can stay exposed to brainwashing and remain the same, or escape being annihilated. The only way to cope is to not get exposed. Either kill the brainwashing signal, or shield from it.
Same dog can be trained to guide, or to kill. Reality is irrelevant. Truth is irrelevant. Unless it strikes one dead in an instant. But usually it takes time until the reality and the truth catch up with the neural network mis-training. Meanwhile bad things and suffering may happen.
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TL;DR
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One can only vote for the laws of our society, but can not vote for the laws of physics, therefore voted "experts" is a bad idea.