So true. Thanks for echoing what many of us immediately thought about. Personally, this recent anti-expert fad is neatly capture by this 2016 cartoon => https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a20630
Many of us were told growing up that we were a special snowflake. Not sure there's correlation (not sure how you'd prove it), but I have my suspicions. IMO we're in the age of individualism. Hopefully it's just a cycle.
The real kicker is it seems to be self-fulfilling. If experts are no longer trusted or respected, the market / margin for expertise shrinks. You get lots of self-proclaimed experts to fill in the gaps with less investment (lower margin == lower investment, clickbait), and then the individual is justified in thinking most expertise is crap... because it is now crap (advertiser supported business model).
Maybe we wake up some day and say "Holy shit, it's all just bullshit!" and then expertise can again attract an audience that's willing to pay for it.
This is beyond foolish, and untrue, and if it were true, it is a relatively new phenomenon.
People do not believe the opposite of what experts tell them unless encouraged to do so, and given a set of plausible reasons.
While sometimes this has merit (because experts are not always right), it is almost always done by people who having something to gain from a public discordance with expert opinion.
In addition, "experts" have been made much less visible in our society than they once were, largely due to the democritization of communication technology but also the concomittant rise of self-promoters. A lot of the reactions to "experts" are actually just reactions to noise.
Finally, the single most important issue with public/expert interactions IMO is the media-driven lack of tolerance for nuance on the part of the public. People are much less willing to accept actual expert answers, which tend to be of the form "well, it could be X, but it could also be Y, we probably won't know until we do Z". Consequently, a secondary stream of not-actual experts emerges, who provide the handholding answers like "It's X", and this is then used to disparage actual expert opinion when it turns out to be Y.
There are fields where "expertise" is hard to establish and of limited utility, and the expression of opinion there is primarily a statement of ideology and desire. I think that severe skepticism is warranted there, even more than the general skepticism one should apply. But FFS, it is what "experts" know and do that has bought us so much power, agency and comfort in the world, and the idea that believing the opposite of them is a good heuristic is just nuts.
I’m from a reasonably poor background so my experience has been almost the opposite, that experts are derided and seen as weirdos who are missing some aspect of reality.
I get that there is a portion of the population for which what you say is true, but I’m sceptical that you aren’t aware of what I’m talking about, but if you’ve genuinely managed to avoid it up until now, then you’re welcome I guess
It seems pretty useful. A big reason trust in experts is falling is because the label is so often wrongly applied to people who have no concrete demonstrable expertise but merely work for the right sort of institutions or have the right sort of politics. The word expert has become nearly as useless as the word racist or fascist.
Example: Imagine you're reading an article about the tech industry and you read the phrase, "according to experts". Do you think the people about to be quoted will be actual tech industry workers, or, academics? Almost always it's going to be the latter and you can repeat that for almost any field.
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.
Experts themselves have created the problem. People mistrust experts not because people worship ignorance and wallow in their own narcissism - which many people do, certainly - but because experts are routinely bought and sold by non-experts.
Need a tax break? Buy a politician and start shopping for an expert. Eventually you'll find one.
He mentions that people are not equipped to judge evidence properly, which is often true. However, people are also not well equipped to judge expertise either.
In the past few decades, we have witnessed what appears to be massive failure of experts on a number of fronts. In the media, people who certainly look like experts turn out to be con men... when well dressed "doctors" and "scientists" lie and trick people into making terrible choices, we grow suspicious. Anyone can pretend to know what they are doing, and blind trust of such people is a dangerous path to follow. Even the antivax people have what appears to a layman to be experts backing their side of the story.
Further, specifically in the areas of social policy, finance, and politics, the past decade or more seems to many to have been a disaster. Thousands of experts missed the financial disaster, and, from what the story looks like to many, bungled the recovery. The news that sells is all about disaster and the unexpected; things that experts failed to predict.
In is unsurprising, given these circumstances, that the title of expert is viewed not with blind respect, but with suspicion. If you claim to be an expert, then you are instantly placed in the same category as people who just want to exploit me for a quick buck.
I don't have a solution, but it is an explanation, and "trusting experts more" is not going to happen.
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