I’m an extreme (>99th percentile) non-credentialist. Does that mean if I find out someone has a nutrition Ph.D., then I don’t think they know more about nutrition than most random people? Of course not. Credentials are evidence of what someone knows (e.g., having a nutrition Ph.D. is evidence that you have nutrition knowledge).
But part of what makes me an extreme non-credentialist is that if I spend an hour watching someone with a nutrition Ph.D. debate a completely self-taught person, and the Ph.D. is making bad arguments and pointing to weak evidence, and the self-taught person is making very solid arguments and pointing to strong evidence and has a very solid command of the relevant facts, the fact that the first person has a Ph.D. will be nearly completely washed out for me at that point, and I will trust the second person’s view of nutrition far more based on the quality of their thinking and the reasons underlying why they believe what they do.
So, being a non-credentialist to me isn’t about thinking that credentials are meaningless, but rather, it involves being willing to quickly update away from the evidence of a credential once you have more direct evidence about the way a person comes to conclusions and what they know.
Most Ph.D.s in a subject are vastly more reliable sources of information on that subject than most non-Ph.D.s on that same subject, but there are lots of exceptions, and sometimes self-taught people are absolutely world-class (and, in any human endeavor, plenty of people with fancy credentials are actually full of B.S.)
Another thing that makes me a non-credentialist is that I love to see highly credible, highly knowledgeable, self-taught people discussing topics and spreading their ideas (whereas some people are very much rubbed the wrong way when someone is talking publicly about a topic they lack a credential in).
An important note: when there is a strong scientific consensus, that is usually a strong starting point for beliefs on topics you know little about (e.g., in physics or biology), even though the consensus is not always right. But trusting the scientific consensus is not the same as trusting one person due to their credentials – a strong scientific consensus is typically more reliable than individual experts.
If you’d like to figure out how much of a credentialist or non-credentialist you are, you can take our credentialist test here.
This piece was first written on February 28, 2024, and first appeared on my website on March 22, 2024.
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