What objective metric is there, if any, of tarnished credibility?

[ScienceNostalgia101]

Have you ever had your opinions dismissed out of hand, on other webforums, by people who invoke the other things you've gotten wrong as justification for dismissing them out of hand?

 

Have you ever noticed that a majority of people on these sites either made, or failed to distance themselves from, a comparable number of incorrect statements, and ignore your comparisons of these to the things you yourself got wrong?

 

I feel reminded of this by recent political trends. The right spent the late 90s howling at the moon over Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, yet lets Trump get away with something similar. A majority of Republican voters let them get away with it, claiming to find worse the supposed hypocrisy of the left caring more about the sex assault allegations against Trump than those against Biden, though personally I consider the former more credible.

 

Obviously the first and foremost message of this is "we need ranked ballots, fast, if only to give people a chance to choose a real third party alternative." But the secondary message is; is there any objective metric of tarnished credibility?

 

Many of my views are shaped by following the gradient of credibility upwards. But this gradient of credibility doesn't always lead me in the right direction. The one-child policy thread on this very board features a reference to how I used to defend it based on the flawed arguments of a majority of its critics, and have come to regret that upon discovering better arguments against it. Fearmongering about the supposed attractiveness of so-called "bad boys" supposedly causing other males to imitate their behaviour to be perceived as attractive caught my attention for being an alarmingly cynical take on love, but Attack Of The Clones also had an alarmingly cynical take on love without me finding it convincing; it was the fact that people who say it were dismissed as "just jealous" (a phrase that doesn't exactly have a strong track record on being used by the right sides of history; see also market worship) that made the attention-grabbing fearmongering also convincing, until I saw people give my sister grief for dating a dropout... and now I no longer know who to believe on this sort of thing.

 

But then the question becomes; what's the alternative? If something has expert consensus on its side, but a majority of its supporters are ignorant and/or arrogant, should the experts be dismissed out of hand for being on the same side of the issue as said majority?

Edited December 24, 2020 by ScienceNostalgia101