![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/flexbooth/AK9SXsKJ8TVC5TakfPyJs83LsFeWA2DW6bpPiKZ5hmkNrquTqSSfxgkRYQU1BXm.png)




It's odd that people have embraced hard scientists as an ultimate, unquestionable authority and it seems that we don't afford that truth to anybody of any other discipline.

Yes, I think it's logical to say that, if you're not a physicist and you're disagreeing with a physicist about physics, you're more likely to be wrong. But, notice that I said "more likely" rather than "automatically." The current attitude among a lot of people is to declare that if you're not a scientist and you voice any disagreement, even if the disagreement isn't about the science but about the values that people are trying to extract from the science, you're automatically wrong.

I don't know how many people are aware of this, but, economics is a discipline that people spend their entire lives studying. Have you noticed that everybody seems to have passionate opinions about economics and they're rarely actual economists? When was the last time you heard a person tell a person who isn't an economist who just shared an opinion about economics to just shut up? 

I hate to break it to a lot of you; but, the debate about free markets and state socialism in economics isn't equivalent to the debate about whether or not the lockdowns worked wherein there's *at least some* semblance of an argument on both sides. Supporting state socialism is basically like debating physics and claiming that gravity doesn't exist. You would be on the fringe of the economics community. Still, we're not gonna see many people to shut up if you voice the opinion that we should nationalize the oil industry if you're not an economist - you'll probably be called an idiot though.

Maybe it's because too few people have read Hume who *correctly* said that you can't extract an ought from an is. Most of the "You're not a scientist; so, shut up." people are taking what they regard as an *is* and trying to insist that that immediately creates the *ought* rather than simply informing it. When it comes to economics, people start with the *ought* and do a lot of gymnastics in order to find and *is* to support it.

Regardless, the statement, "You're not x; so, you can't voice an opinion on x." is never a valid argument. 99.99999% of the time it's hypocritical because we all voice opinions about things that are outside of our fields of study. It's always lazy. It's usually disingenuous.

Basically, just stop pretending that there's any virtue in appealing to authority when it comes to science.