Personally, I am more likely to trust sources that appear to think critically. A lot of reports are heavily one sided, and will provide a lot of evidence backing up a point, while appearing to hide the evidence of the opposition.
I find that a much stronger piece comes when a report questions its own assumptions and explains why we are making a judgement given the shortcomings of the initial argument.
When you consume mainstream media you get a lot of one-sided reporting, which inspires me to try to find the holes in their arguments. This puts in the position of question Coronavirus measures etc.
The reality is, the people making the measures are probably aware of the assumptions they are making, and are trying to recommend the best approach given what we don't know. Given the limited information, it is nice to have as much transparency as possible though.
> I am more likely to trust sources that appear to think critically
Information-warfare specialists know exactly how to exploit that attitude. Sowing distrust of mainstream media is core to their strategy, so that people will be "skeptical" about anything they say and turn to alternative outlets. How is it done? Easy: create the appearance of greater balance or depth without its substance. Create strawman versions of objections only to knock them down, include data points that appear to make the analysis more inclusive but don't change its outcome, toss in a few dubious factoids or citations, etc. It's not even that hard. Before long you'll have plenty of people who are "inspired" to poke holes in the mainstream narrative (but not their preferred one) and "question" mainstream advice (ditto) to carry on the fight for you.
OTOH, having registered a mere two hours ago and only ever commented on this article, I suspect that you're well aware of those tactics.
The body of the article contains a really good descriptions of the heuristic shortcuts we use, and their limitations.
The title, though, seems to assume the result. Trust in authority, confirmation bias, and sampling based on your peers' beliefs could just as well make you overestimate a risk as underestimate it.
It's this kind of openly biased article that makes people perceive academia as blind to its own failings and ideological dementia.
I'll summarise the article.
Apparently only conservatives stick to deadly beliefs. They're bad because they don't listen to academics (ever, any of them) in order to follow "authoritarian ideology". People blindly follow the words of authority figures, and that's bad because of an example involving Trump and chloroquine.
What about when people blindly follow what academic authorities say? Well, that's totally rational of course because those experts make smart decisions, so don't think or ask questions, just obey:
We all need to be more intellectually humble. We all need to recognize that how certain we feel is irrelevant to how certain we should be. We need to recognize that there are scientists and medical experts out there who have the knowledge and expertise we need to make smart decisions
The lack of self-awareness in this lady is astonishing. She's a psychologist. Psychology has had its credibility utterly trashed by the growing awareness that so much of what they do doesn't replicate and/or contains major errors. The evidence grows all the time that listening to psychologists is a good way to make dumb decisions whilst feeling smart. Yet she says:
As for behavioral and cognitive scientists, we don’t yet know if the tendency to hold onto dubious beliefs can be trained out of people
Indeed we don't. I guess a good place to start would be trying to train her colleagues out of the many, many dubious beliefs that pop psychology and other academic backwaters propagate every day.
In this crisis we see the man who first wrote about the replication crisis once again publicly warning us about the dodgy data and modelling being done by academic 'experts', people who are never held to account for mistaken predictions and thus have no incentive not to constantly give us confident sounding 'expert advice', regardless of their own certainty. Who should we listen to? The article doesn't help answer this.
I find that a much stronger piece comes when a report questions its own assumptions and explains why we are making a judgement given the shortcomings of the initial argument.
When you consume mainstream media you get a lot of one-sided reporting, which inspires me to try to find the holes in their arguments. This puts in the position of question Coronavirus measures etc.
The reality is, the people making the measures are probably aware of the assumptions they are making, and are trying to recommend the best approach given what we don't know. Given the limited information, it is nice to have as much transparency as possible though.