Turns out the "fucking" experts were mostly afraid that their careers and "gain of function"-research could loose their grants and connections.

Money and PR have eroded away the societal trust into science. Tobacco is harmless. Sugar is healthy. Social science topped it off, when it declared that he who yells loudest, is always the one owning the truth, which is relative and just a display of power.

Little, big lies, that now have eaten their way into the core of the whole institution, from the point of view of the common men. No solutions for the big problems (energy/environment protection), but lots of small problems, while flooding the world with un-replicatable drivel. And getting demeaning and insulting does not repair the damage.

One problem is I need to be an expert to decipher what the experts are saying (and who is an expert, and which experts to listen to).

So instead I rely on various secondary and tertiary sources to help me make sense of the world, which opens up the possibility that my sources are wrong or even manipulative. But how would I ever know? I'm not an expert.

> One problem is I need to be an expert to decipher what the experts are saying (and who is an expert, and which experts to listen to).

No you don't? Probably most countries have health ministries which lead the fight against the pandemic, usually via some proxy ( like head epidemiologist, or a person appointed specifically for that task). The guidance they and the WHO gave is the expert guidance, and at least the latter was given in a very digestible format for the general public.

WHO and CDC guidance were murky early on (made even less clear by people actively trying to confuse people). Consider the confusion about whether asymptomatic spread is possible (WHO not effectively communicating the difference between "truly asymptomatic " and presymptomatic), or confusion over whether to use masks (getting translated into "masks don't work" by the game-of-telephone that is social media).

Or consider the controversies over drugs used to fight COVID-19. People advocating their use were physicians -- that makes them experts relative to me. Then other physicians said no, they don't work and are dangerous. They are also experts. Who am I to believe?

This problem goes beyond the pandemic. Doctors of medicine use jargon derived from Greek and Latin both for historic reasons and with the purpose of creating an air of authority. But when someone comes along and usurps that language, it sounds to an uneducated ear like the real thing. That's how we end up with people drinking special water to alter blood pH to prevent cancer. Absurd? Maybe. But if you have letters after your name and I don't, how can I know?

> The best advice is listen to the fucking experts, locally and globally, think about it, compare with reputable online sources.

The “experts” have been exposed lying, and carrying out their own political agendas many times throughout this pandemic. The appeal to authority is a logical fallacy in the first place, and “expert” credibility is (rightly) at an all time low. It’s now almost entirely evaluated politically, rather than on any criteria of trustworthiness.

I would suggest the best advice is to treat everything you hear/read with a healthy dose of skepticism, especially in regards to people who rely heavily on their credentials to deflect criticism.

> The “experts” have been exposed lying

This is the biggest problem that social media has brought us. Everyone is under scrutiny, afraid of the mob, afraid of losing their job. Too many experts go along with the dogma-de-jour. And then, like we're all idiots or something, they just "flip" and say the opposite, thinking we won't notice, because scrolling back 3 months on Twitter is hard.

I think the fundamental issue is that the most important factor in succeeding as a politician (and I mean that in the broader sense of anybody who takes on political accountability), is the art of avoiding accountability entirely. The truth often stand directly in the way of that objective, so this idea of the scientific politician is already starting off as a bit of an oxymoron.

Another problem is that politicians are just fundamentally bad at risk management. I’m sure we’ve all worked with those types of politicians at least once. They never want to try anything, because the risk it will fail is unacceptable, and the most important part of solving any problem is finding somebody else to blame. Politicians in public office are the worst at this. I used to live in a place where road deaths where a big cause for public concern, and I watched somebody get elected to office on the platform of reducing road deaths to 0. Now, anybody with any experience in risk management would know that attempting to reduce the likelihood of any risk to 0 is not only a bad idea, but is just simply impossible. The goal of risk management is to reduce the likelihood and impact of risks to an acceptable level, but a politician can’t stand in front of a news camera and say “an acceptable number of people died on our roads this year”.

I think even if you left the risk assessment portion of pandemic management entirely to the “experts”, it’s this deeply flawed style of politically managing these risks that has been biggest source of controversy. To start making risk management decisions on behalf of other people, it is necessary to curtail their liberty, and regardless of how medically unqualified the general population is, they can plainly see that a lot of the policy decisions around the pandemic have been very politically influenced.

> The “experts” have been exposed lying, and carrying out their own political agendas many times throughout this pandemic

That will depend on a per country basis. In the ones i followed there were no lies, only revisions in guidance based on better knowledge of the situation.

> The appeal to authority is a logical fallacy in the first place, and “expert” credibility is (rightly) at an all time low.

Yes, and that's how we got shit like Trump and Brexit, because people are "sick of experts" and decide to yolo it for the guy screaming the loudest. Guess what, that doesn't work, and you're much better off listening to experts, and evaluating what they're saying, rather than ignoring them and going with the village idiot. Experts can lie, be frauds, have conflicts of interest, etc. but their reputation and credibility are paramount. Which politicians or talk show hosts, because that's apparently who people take their pandemic guidance on, are credible?

> I would suggest the best advice is to treat everything you hear/read with a healthy dose of skepticism, especially in regards to people who rely heavily on their credentials to deflect criticism

And by having everyone doubt everything, you end up with people believing in Q shit in Germany. Skepticism is critical, but too much of it just creates chaos.

Personally, I’d generally consider blaming outcomes that you don’t like on people exercising their freedom to think for themselves too liberally to be a particularly low-effort criticism. You should always be skeptical of everything, you should be especially skeptical of people who claim their credentials place them above scrutiny. This is the very basis of critical thought, you can never have enough of it, and people being free to think for themselves is the most fundamental form of liberty.

Seems to me like experts are just following the herd advocating the things most politically palpable. For example, the public likes travel restrictions, and (a sizeable subset of them) become viciously outraged over herd immunity, so whatever scientifically-based policies countries had previously are dropped under the guise of supposedly learning more. Yeah they learned better how to keep their jobs.