Ultimately, I see the root cause of this dichotomy as a side-effect of The Death of The Expert.
Edumucated Folk live in one Universe, and Working Joe on Main St lives in another Universe.
By the time you finish 10 years of secondary education, you think you're smart, but mostly all you've done is chain together countless memorized assumptions about how various model parameters should work to over-fit your mental interpolator of the Map of the World.
You become so educated that you filter our more than you realize. You don't even notice, like a fish never notices the ocean in which it swims.
The Academically credentialed refer to others just like themselves, because Authority only works if you mutually vouch for each other, by adhering to the same rules. Outsiders are Othered, smugly laughed at and ignored like Morlocks.
Look at any big example where The Experts not only were off, but were Not Even Wrong, turning a Moonshot into a Neptune shot, then trying to cover up their mistakes to save face so they won't be de-credentialed and forced to go live in the sewers under Metropolis.
Pick any major World event, and you'll find The Smartest Guys in the Room, who earn more in 1 year than Joe on Main St will in his entire life, and who COMPLETELY BUNGLED what ever they claimed they knew with near absolute certainty, because they are Scientists who use Evidence and Math that nobody can proof read, but trust us buddy, you dudn't get a PhD from MIT like all of us did.
1. Iraq WMD: look how spectacularly wrong were the several thousand Experts from 100's of Professional Fields.
2. 2008 Depression.
20,000 Genius Quants and Nobel Prize Winners and top billionaires and the Gods Upon Mount Olympus all bet their reputations that a 1-in-60 trillion Outlier event could never, ever happen.
This Time It's Different.
The price of houses will never go down, so it's a AAA double certified bet to use it as collateral to take out huge loans by increasing the multiple by which you are leveraged in your hedged bets.
And it all blew up.
3. Syria. All the idiot Experts yet again assembled to recommend the real solution is covertly arm ISIS to topple Assad, then send in the Marines to whack ISIS and install some new puppet.
All the experts yet again were so blindly certain that their models were the Territory that they stopped looking at the newest changes on the Map.
Oh, now ISIS declared War on the West? Well that fact can't possibly fit into our Narrative that we Experts know is scientifically true, so let's just ignore it.
Oh, what's this, hundreds of thousands of social media accounts are joining ISIS and threating to overthrow us in our own Nations?
Well that's just preposterous, we know with absolute certainty that 99.9999999% of Muslims are Peaceful. Therefore, let's invite 10, then 20, then 100 million of them to cross our borders and live next door, all so we can retain our Cognitive Dissonance that we are The Experts, we can't be wrong because otherwise why should I have a PhD and earn 20x more than you, a mere Uber driver with no credentials?
4. As Programmers, we are the Enlightened Class, we build the future while Joe Blow on Main St just lives in the Minecrafted Utopia which we sculpt for him. We are Urban Liberal Atheist/Pagans with refined intellectual pursuits, we love Truth and Equality and by golly we really are going to CHANGE THE WORLD, hold hands, sing Kumbaya We Are The World around the SpaceX AI Rocket that will take us all to our new life awaiting us on Mars.
Meanwhile, out of 18,000,000 or so code monkeys on Earth, not even a handful have any idea that all of our computer security is fake, the NSA quite literally records and decrypts everything, using 10,000 new 0day per year which they purchase from Respectable Programmers like you who have a bright future and just want to do the right thing by cooperating with the NSA for a well earned comfortable upper-middle-class salary.
Then Snowden appears and pops your Truman Show bubbke like Copernicus deprecated Ptolomy.
All The Experts assemble like Avengers yet again. They all recommend, everything is fine Mr Joe Blow, we paid a vendor millions for a pretty dashboard of Analytics Big Data charts to tell us that everythibg's fine. We're in The Cloud, we're patched, we use 2FA on E2E with Axolotl Rachets stacked to the Moon and we're Lifetime Gold Donors to the EFF and several Houses of Fierce, Intrepid Journalism.
5. Guccifer the Shadowbroker hacked the shit out of everything.
You name it, it's compromised. VPN, ssh, every web, email, file, chat, dns, ntp, database, all of it is now known to be hijacked.
Can we still trust the banks, the utilities, the telcoes, the defense contractors, the media conglomerates, the entertainment, the software, the OEMs, etc?
You say Trust Us, we're the Experts.
See how this works? Processions of Expert Pied Pipers lead us off a cliff into the ocean like lemmings.
Is Joe Blow on Main St a dumb racist redneck for taking one look at that ol' Bull you're selling, but instead flipping the Series of Tubes to check out what Alex Jones and /pol/ and UFO chasers and Chentrails kooks and Reptillian Agenda paranoids and monetized Youtubers have to say about The Real News?
From where I'm at, living in a card board box on Main St with no future, I'm going with what Joe says he saw Alex say about the Pizzagate-Soros-Globalists. I may not be an Expert beyond Main St, but I do know the only person who never lied to me was the hacker who leaked all the Expert's shit to Wikileaks. It's not a perfect Map of the World, but it's a helluva lot more accurate than the total disasters we got by listening to The Experts.
The problem is our egos get in the way of real facts. Experts are humans and they are just as vulnerable to being wrong as the rest of us. Its great that there are people who dedicate there lives to a discipline, but sometimes experts use there positions of being right to distort larger truths, especially in areas where we don't have all the facts, but think we do, and when careers are on the line, experts can ban together to protect themselves. Id rather find my own way to the truth, then to rely on an expert that may or may not have an interest in protecting themselves from career breaking situations.
Expert positions can create a false sense of security that we know all there is to know about a subject, and that is just as damaging to society as not knowing the truth.
To me, the problem is that the expert, especially in things like social science and public policy, may be hugely biased. The very fact that experts in these fields often have diametrically opposed viewpoints do not engender trust when it comes experts in these fields.
I absolutely agree with the main thrust of your comment, but I want to point out that in unprecedented times specifically, the odds that a smart non-expert is more correct than an expert are substantially higher than in normal times.
> "Experts" are just people with their own inherent biases.
This is an absurd and false statement, and is a perfect summation of why so much mis/disinformation floats around and is so popular in today's online world.
Experts do indeed have their own inherent biases. This part is a glib truism because experts are people, and all people have biases which both consciously and unconsciously influence their decision making.
But that is not "just" what experts are. Experts are people who have, by definition, expertise in a given subject matter. Unless you too are an equal expert in a given topic, experts--once again by definition--know more than you do in that field.
It doesn't mean you need to take what they say as gospel, so to speak, but it does mean that when the choice is to listen to 'random person on the internet' versus 'someone who has studied something for years and has made valued contributions to the field', the two-despite both having biases-are not on equal footing.
I believe this is part of the broader pattern of inequality in the US, and a sentiment that this inequality is unjustified. Some of of the anti-expert sentiment probably reflects a believe that the expertise is unjustified or false. However, I believe that much of it isn't so much a belief that expertise is not valued at all, but that too much certainty is attached to expert versus nonexpert ideas or opinions. That is, it's not that the expertise isn't valuable, but that the fallibility of expertise is underacknowledged.
Some of what's played out over the last few years in this regard is more a matter of principle or rejection of the societal and institutional structures that allow expertise to grow too much in power, or suppress individual autonomy, rather than because of disagreement with a particular expert position.
If you take away competition, and encourage inflated credentials through a society that overemphasizes them, and minimize people's ability to assert choice, you're going to end up with resistance. I sincerely believe this plays out on the left as well as right in different ways.
Like a lot of things, the truth is in the middle, and for awhile the pendulum has swung in the direction of certified experts. The problem with this societal paradigm is that experts are often wrong, there's fads, and corruption. Responses to criticism that label the critics uninformed, unscientific, or defective (eg paranoid) are essentially ad hominem. A system like this will inevitably fail because the experts are shielded from responsibility, when if anything they should be expected to be able to tolerate greater criticism.
This problem cuts across many areas at the moment. Economics isn't the only thing.
The segregation of knowledgeable people into sets of experts based on domains of expertise is more the problem than individuals specializing. People will doggedly pursue answers to their questions without such rigid social structures, but it prevents the interaction between people that would otherwise fruitfully cooperate together. These structures, I believe, mostly serve political and bureaucratic functions rather than the facilitation of human inquiry. We like to pretend our institutions are optimized for their ends, but usually they're optimized for the allocation of resources and power. Cutting people up into experts, giving them titles, making them clique together, impairs them but it makes them 'easier to manage'.
these are all good observations but they miss coalescing an approachable framing of understanding, not the least of which, by accepting expertise as a legitimate concept in the first place.
one elucidating observation is to realize that the term 'expert' is largely a mediopolitical assertion. that is, people who have no qualifications in a given field use 'experts' to assert the credibility of their narrative by choosing a single/small voice from that field to represent the entirety of it's esteem. that's quintessentially a political act, to influence others, perhaps unduly, perhaps against their own interest, which is where the trust dies away.
trust develops among humans through direct interaction and obseration, and most experts haven't gained that directly with an audience. at best, they've done so among a small, arbitrary (to observers) group of people around the 'expert'. moreover, trust isn't a singular concept. people trust others for their political motivations much more often than technical skill, for instance. bury that under many layers of credentialism, an abstraction specifically designed to convey trust where it can't be built naturally, and where we go wrong societally starts to become clear.
when seeking information in a mediopolitical context (e.g., all of social media and news), the most reasonable course of action (for most people most of the time) is to disregard expertise entirely, because the purpose in that context is to mislead via an appeal to (constructed) authority, even if subtly and relatively benignly. it's propaganda built on top of slivers of factuality loaned in from 'experts', in a grand jostling for voice, relevance, and power. none of it should be taken seriously from a technical point of view.
There is a pretty good book called “the Death or Expertise” that discusses the broad trend towards people with little specialized knowledge feeling they can learn a domain quickly and know more than experts.
So many problems we have in society seem to be caused by this mass weaponized Dunning-Kruger effect.
Correct, because experts in one domain are not immune to fallacious thinking in an adjacent one. Part of being an expert is communicating to the wider public, and if you sound as grandiose as some of the AI doomers to the layman you've failed already.
Being expert in adjacent domains is sometimes worse than being clueless. The ratio of actual to assumed expertise seems to get worse. Navy captains vs shipping boats, geologists vs climate scientists, programmers vs cpu design, etc etc. You can very easily not understand subtleties, comment on a thing, and then people listen to you.
You notice it's rarely the physics professors, or the (good) programming teachers, or the medical profs going, 'Our students don't respect our expertise any more'?
Expertise needs to grant you a visible advantage in some way, or of course people aren't going to respect it. You can respect experts with computers very easily, they can do things you can't, or they can do things you can much more easily.
Expertise in other areas is similar. Trained doctors produce measurably better outcomes than laymen and the system in which they're trained is trustable enough, and the systems they practice in are generally well designed enough, that it's pretty common wisdom to trust doctors. Of course not everyone does, but then again people have believed in crap like homeopathy for a long time, that's nothing new.
Experts in philosophy? Social science? English? That's a lot harder to measure, and to then be sure that you've got someone who's a well-vetted member of the expert group, rather than someone with a degree who's spamming noise is harder still. Not that I'm saying that they are, just that the visible manifestations of their expertise are very hard for the average person to see in some areas.
And let's face it, as students - by and large - aren't expected to do particularly hard things any more in most subject areas, that provides less and less opportunity for the expert to demonstrate their skill even when someone has the rare opportunity of interacting with them.
###
----------------------
> Once upon a time — way back in the Dark Ages before the 2000s — people seemed to understand, in a general way, the difference between experts and laymen. There was a clear demarcation in political food fights, as objections and dissent among experts came from their peers — that is, from people equipped with similar knowledge. The public, largely, were spectators.
----------------------
And thus you can't say either way whether they respected you enough to change their opinion, at least not based solely on that observation. Their thoughts simply weren't on display.
It's great to have academic qualifications, but you still have such a limited sphere of experience and knowledge - even more so the higher you go in academia.
It's more the gap between experts and non-experts. Pop-sci has turned Dunning-Kruger into a religion, but pop-journalism of all kinds delights in reporting that experts are corrupt and/or hostile and/or wrong.
And often they are, especially in some fields. The problem is that non-experts see "science" and "experts" as single classes, with no understanding of the difference between a professional researcher at the Perimeter Institute and some paid-for PR shill wackjob dredged up to fill airtime on a talk show.
Let's not forget that "medical experts" literally promoted the health benefits of smoking, and of products that encouraged people to consume radium.
To an outsider, it must be very confusing. It's easier, as a heuristic, to dismiss everyone's expertise than it is to take the time to try to assess relative competence.
Unfortunately physics has a huge problem, because it's been made to seem sexy and mediafied.
It's been popularised to an extreme degree, and people who don't know what a differential equation is and would have no idea how to start a practical engineering project, whether it's bridge building or aerospace or electronics, believe they can talk with authority about quantum theory.
There's a subtext which is even more disturbing - the idea there's a democratic right to have opinions about these things (which is fair enough) and to have the opinions taken seriously by professionals (which isn't.)
The problem with experts has come from the divide of physical competence from decision making and power. An expert now is someone whose skills are for navigating bureaucracy and politics, and they hire talent to provide any facts they might need. These experts are politicians, and not practitioners.
The author says, "The cure for these transgressions, however, is not to replace expertise with ignorance: It is to replace it with better expertise. If complaints about experts were meant to restore a balance between experts and laypeople, experts would be the first to support it. But this requires voters to be at least modestly informed, not simply convinced they are automatically right. And as it stands now, attacks on expertise often amount to a demand from ordinary citizens—sometimes encouraged by politicians and hucksters—that their views, no matter how contradictory or hazardous, be considered equal to those of the most experienced expert."
No. The answer is to a) demand a demonstrable bar of current physical domain competence on anyone professing expertise, and b) reduce the role of deference to so-called experts by promoting and rewarding the values of personal accountability and agency, and c) hold experts accountable for lying or being wrong. What we have suppressed and consequently, lack, are the costly honest signals of expertise.
Education credentials do not suffice today either, because if you want to know what a 30yr old with a master's degree and an unsecured 150% debt to income ratio working as a jr. analyst in a consulting firm will tell you about the problem you need solved, I'll save you the retainer, the answer is: anything you want.
The reaction against incompetent intellectuals is that their interests can compromise their apprehension of facts so much so that in any serious situation, a reasonable person cannot trust a modern professed expert to put the truth ahead of their self-interest. When you trade on physical skill like coding or engineering, you have a stake in being wrong, because your reputation and survival depends on being right. When you trade on a position or credentials, the consequences for stepping out of line are greater than those of lying, and the incentives are clear.
Many experts can't even tell themselves, because they were educated by constructivists. The way to use experts is not a matter of whether they are lying or not, but assess whether they even know if they are lying, and what the consequences of being misled by them might be.
Listening to experts doesn't mitigate consequences, especially in examples of things in recent memory like asbestos, thalidomide, attacking middle eastern countries, collateralized debt obligations (squared), lockdowns, and what we are about to see with monetization and electronic identity papers. My advice would be to always consult experts, but rarely believe them.
Im not sure what you mean by the 'Era of Experts', much less it coming to an end. Can you explain this further?
Im all for making people come out of their ivory towers a bit more but to suggest that having high levels of knowledge in a given subject is somehow a negative seems an odd position to take. But maybe Im reading you wrong?
Edumucated Folk live in one Universe, and Working Joe on Main St lives in another Universe.
By the time you finish 10 years of secondary education, you think you're smart, but mostly all you've done is chain together countless memorized assumptions about how various model parameters should work to over-fit your mental interpolator of the Map of the World.
You become so educated that you filter our more than you realize. You don't even notice, like a fish never notices the ocean in which it swims.
The Academically credentialed refer to others just like themselves, because Authority only works if you mutually vouch for each other, by adhering to the same rules. Outsiders are Othered, smugly laughed at and ignored like Morlocks.
Look at any big example where The Experts not only were off, but were Not Even Wrong, turning a Moonshot into a Neptune shot, then trying to cover up their mistakes to save face so they won't be de-credentialed and forced to go live in the sewers under Metropolis.
Pick any major World event, and you'll find The Smartest Guys in the Room, who earn more in 1 year than Joe on Main St will in his entire life, and who COMPLETELY BUNGLED what ever they claimed they knew with near absolute certainty, because they are Scientists who use Evidence and Math that nobody can proof read, but trust us buddy, you dudn't get a PhD from MIT like all of us did.
1. Iraq WMD: look how spectacularly wrong were the several thousand Experts from 100's of Professional Fields.
2. 2008 Depression. 20,000 Genius Quants and Nobel Prize Winners and top billionaires and the Gods Upon Mount Olympus all bet their reputations that a 1-in-60 trillion Outlier event could never, ever happen. This Time It's Different. The price of houses will never go down, so it's a AAA double certified bet to use it as collateral to take out huge loans by increasing the multiple by which you are leveraged in your hedged bets.
And it all blew up.
3. Syria. All the idiot Experts yet again assembled to recommend the real solution is covertly arm ISIS to topple Assad, then send in the Marines to whack ISIS and install some new puppet.
All the experts yet again were so blindly certain that their models were the Territory that they stopped looking at the newest changes on the Map.
Oh, now ISIS declared War on the West? Well that fact can't possibly fit into our Narrative that we Experts know is scientifically true, so let's just ignore it.
Oh, what's this, hundreds of thousands of social media accounts are joining ISIS and threating to overthrow us in our own Nations?
Well that's just preposterous, we know with absolute certainty that 99.9999999% of Muslims are Peaceful. Therefore, let's invite 10, then 20, then 100 million of them to cross our borders and live next door, all so we can retain our Cognitive Dissonance that we are The Experts, we can't be wrong because otherwise why should I have a PhD and earn 20x more than you, a mere Uber driver with no credentials?
4. As Programmers, we are the Enlightened Class, we build the future while Joe Blow on Main St just lives in the Minecrafted Utopia which we sculpt for him. We are Urban Liberal Atheist/Pagans with refined intellectual pursuits, we love Truth and Equality and by golly we really are going to CHANGE THE WORLD, hold hands, sing Kumbaya We Are The World around the SpaceX AI Rocket that will take us all to our new life awaiting us on Mars.
Meanwhile, out of 18,000,000 or so code monkeys on Earth, not even a handful have any idea that all of our computer security is fake, the NSA quite literally records and decrypts everything, using 10,000 new 0day per year which they purchase from Respectable Programmers like you who have a bright future and just want to do the right thing by cooperating with the NSA for a well earned comfortable upper-middle-class salary.
Then Snowden appears and pops your Truman Show bubbke like Copernicus deprecated Ptolomy.
All The Experts assemble like Avengers yet again. They all recommend, everything is fine Mr Joe Blow, we paid a vendor millions for a pretty dashboard of Analytics Big Data charts to tell us that everythibg's fine. We're in The Cloud, we're patched, we use 2FA on E2E with Axolotl Rachets stacked to the Moon and we're Lifetime Gold Donors to the EFF and several Houses of Fierce, Intrepid Journalism.
5. Guccifer the Shadowbroker hacked the shit out of everything. You name it, it's compromised. VPN, ssh, every web, email, file, chat, dns, ntp, database, all of it is now known to be hijacked.
Can we still trust the banks, the utilities, the telcoes, the defense contractors, the media conglomerates, the entertainment, the software, the OEMs, etc?
You say Trust Us, we're the Experts.
See how this works? Processions of Expert Pied Pipers lead us off a cliff into the ocean like lemmings.
Is Joe Blow on Main St a dumb racist redneck for taking one look at that ol' Bull you're selling, but instead flipping the Series of Tubes to check out what Alex Jones and /pol/ and UFO chasers and Chentrails kooks and Reptillian Agenda paranoids and monetized Youtubers have to say about The Real News?
From where I'm at, living in a card board box on Main St with no future, I'm going with what Joe says he saw Alex say about the Pizzagate-Soros-Globalists. I may not be an Expert beyond Main St, but I do know the only person who never lied to me was the hacker who leaked all the Expert's shit to Wikileaks. It's not a perfect Map of the World, but it's a helluva lot more accurate than the total disasters we got by listening to The Experts.
reply