# Encouraging expertise **URL:** \ **Category:** Community Building\ **Created:** [February 16, 2021, 11:29pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/encouraging-expertise/179961 "2021-02-16T23:29:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 10
**Author:** ![merefield](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/merefield/32/176214_2.png) [@merefield](https://meta.discourse.org/u/merefield)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2021, 7:22am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/encouraging-expertise/179961/10 "2021-02-17T07:22:21Z")
Can’t speak about your field but a lot of ‘expert opinion’ is actually a belief system. The discipline of medicine is a great example. There’s a tonne of dogma and there’s scarily slim foundations for some sets of beliefs. A lot of science in medicine covers associations of observations but far too many ‘experts’ draw unfounded conclusions on causality. If you shut down alternative opinion what you might be doing is shutting down a different belief system. As a result of that you may create a blind spot and miss the fundamental truth. We need to be very careful around this topic. Politics is also a factor and that can poison a lot of different subjects. Take the description ‘climate change denier’ which is arguably a more emotive and politcal than a factual description of an individual? --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/encouraging-expertise/179961)._