In Astral Codex Ten:
WebMD is the Internet’s most important source of medical information. It’s also surprisingly useless. Its most famous problem is that whatever your symptoms, it’ll tell you that you have cancer.
[…]
This is actually a widespread problem in medicine. The worst offender is the FDA, which tends to list every problem anyone had while on a drug as a potential drug side effect, even if it obviously isn’t.
[…]
The essence of Moloch is that if you want to win intense competitions, you have to optimize for winning intense competitions – not for some unrelated thing like giving good medical advice. Google apparently has hard-coded into their search algorithm that WebMD should be on the front page for any medical-related search; I would say they have handily won the intense competition that they’re in. […]
WebMD is too big, too legitimate, and too canonical to be good.
[…]
Dr. Anthony Fauci is the WebMD of people.
[…] He’s a very smart and competent doctor, who wanted to make a positive difference in the US medical establishment, and who quickly learned how to play the game of flattering and placating the right people in order to keep power. In the end, he got power, sometimes he used it well, and other times he struck compromises between using it well and doing dumb things that he needed to do to keep his position.
[…]
Dr. Fauci (and WebMD) are legibly good (or at least legibly okay). They sit on a giant golden throne, with a giant neon arrow pointing to them saying “TRUST THIS GUY”. […] In order to stay on that throne, Dr. Fauci will need to get and keep lots of powerful allies (plus be the sort of person who thinks in terms of how to get allies rather than being minimaxed for COVID-prediction).
[…]
This means experts can play an important role; they’re people who are legibly mediocre. […] I think our system for producing legibly-mediocre people is a good start. It doesn’t always pick the most trustworthy people. But it almost always gets someone in the top 50%, sometimes the top 25%. There are few biologists who deny evolution, few epidemiologists who think vaccines don’t work, and few economists who are outright communists.
Somewhat related, from Paul Graham:
How to get good advice from experts: ask what they’d do in your situation. Many experts feel they should just tell you all the options and let you decide. But they usually know which is the right one, and asking what they’d do gives them permission to tell you.