Bret Devereaux

I am not sure either of us is in a position to lay down rules as to what someone must do to be taken seriously in the IR field, but I take your point that the wording was awkward.

Ehhhh. I mean this is pretty basic I think. If "Saddam had WMDs so we had to invade" *doesn't* get to be a "don't take this person seriously* red flag, what does?

A part of my system of epistemic humility is that other fields decide their own rules for who is to be taken seriously. I cannot decide which physicists ought to be taken seriously on physics. That doesn't change for complex field conducted in plain language, like IR.

That's fair, but it doesn't help me to decide what information to take in and believe. I'm not an expert in IR. Everything I know about it comes from reading conflicting statements of experts and trying to divine from that which policy positions are least risky for me to 1/?

-orient my voting decisions around. I'm never going to be able to actually have an informed opinion on these topics. But I can establish a few red flags to determine who's *not* an expert I should trust. Whose opinion shouldn't be weighted when the time comes for me to make- 2/?

-my imperfect voting decisions or political judgements. One of those is, and I think should be for all US citizens, someone saying in 2020 "We needed to invade Iraq because Saddam had WMDs". And it's a useful enough filter for bad opinions that I'm okay with occasionally- 3/4

-filtering out the rare person who simply ill-spoke when they said that. Like how if a public physicist says "Einstein was wrong about relativity", there may be technical reasons they're not wrong. But it's still a reasonable red flag criteria for a lay person to stop listening.

Paul Poast is an associate professor of political science at UChicago and a foreign policy fellow on the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and has written three books on IR. He an FA's 'best of' article in 2019. So it is possible that you may need to refine your heuristic.