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The Alleged Death of “Experts”
Much ink has been spilled and many teeth gnashed among the media and academic class over the last year over the death of experts and expertise. According to, oddly enough, “experts,” the popular will is overthrowing the proper rule of experts and creating a world without real expertise. That is the thesis of Tom Nichols’ The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters.
This is complete nonsense. What is happening is not the death of expertise but the rational pushback against the overreach of experts.
To understand this backlash, you have to understand the various types of authority. Authority comes in three forms: expert authority, moral authority, and legal authority. Legal authority is just the brute legal power to do something. Expert authority is the authority over the how. Expert authority tells you whether your house is built on a proper foundation, or whether your not feeling well is a case of the flu or something more serious. Moral authority is the authority of the should. An engineer has expert authority on how to build a bridge, but does not necessarily have any moral authority over whether the bridge can be built.
Two things have combined to create a backlash against “experts.” First, experts have tried to assert expert authority over value questions which should be ruled by moral authority. Economics is a good example of this. Economists do have expert authority over the expected effects of a given economic policy. They can tell you that a tariff will cause the price of consumer goods to go up by a given price. And that opinion should hold some weight. What they cannot tell you is whether the tariff is a good or a bad idea. That is not an expert question. That is a value question.
Maybe higher consumer goods prices is a price worth paying for greater employment security or to ensure that the US maintains a certain manufacturing capacity for national security reasons or whatever. Deciding which interest should win out is a moral and political question and not something that economists have any special authority over answering. Yet time and again a particular economic policy is said to not just be best but the only legitimate answer because “economists say so,” as if they have any sort of special authority over larger questions about what kind of an economy or society we should have or which economic interests within it should be rewarded.
Health experts are another example of this sort of overreach. Health experts can tell you that this or that activity creates a greater risk of a heart attack or some other bad outcome. But that knowledge and authority does not translate into any moral authority to tell people how they should or should not live. That is up to the individual. If a person finds that the pleasure of smoking or drinking or eating good food outweighs the risk associated with the activity, no health expert has any moral authority to tell the person they are wrong. Yet time and again the expert authority to explain risk is translated into the moral authority to tell someone what choice they must make.
When experts in a field, be it health, economics, or any other, start to claim their expert authority over a subject gives them moral authority over the decisions relating to that subject, people who are affected by such decisions and who do have moral authority over them understandably reject the “expert” advice. This is not a rejection of expertise. It is a rejection of expertise conferring moral authority over an issue.
The second reason people are rejecting experts is that many of our self appointed “experts” are experts in fields that either do not lend themselves to expert authority or are so underdeveloped that they are scarcely better than cargo cults. There is a push and pull between science and collective folk wisdom. Science looks beyond mere trial and error and our perceptions and finds a deeper truth. If we went by our perceptions, we might still think the earth is flat or that bad humors caused illness.
Folk wisdom, in contrast, is the collective wisdom of trial and error. It doesn’t know why its answers are right or wrong but through trial and error often gets the right answer. To understand this, think of the state of medicine today and in the 18th century. Today, medicine is a real science with real answers and understanding of the problems it seeks to solve. Today, only a nut would seek a folk remedy over modern medicine. In the 18th century, however, medicine was still in its infancy and doctors barely knew how to keep from killing their patients and more often than not did more harm than good. Folk remedies in contrast at least didn’t kill you and often did some good, though no one understood why. In the 18th century, you would have been a nut to go to a doctor and were better off sticking with the folk remedy.
Pretty much all of the social sciences are about where medicine was in the 18th century. Before he became a performance artist, Paul Krugman described the state of economics as about the same as medicine in the late 19th century. Economists, like Victorian doctors, have figured out how not to kill their patients. They know for example that printing huge sums of paper money or a government not honoring its debts or enforcing contract and property rights would kill an economy, but they really have little idea how economies really work or how to fix a bad economy that isn’t the victim of the government trying to destroy it. Krugman is about right. And economics is probably the most advanced social science. The rest are even worse. Yet self appointed “experts” in these fields expect their expert authority to be treated the same way as an M.D.’s expert authority in telling you that you have cancer or diabetes.
This of course is absurd and people know it. Just like the folk remedy worked better than the treatments of the trained doctor in the 18th century, today the parent or the local teacher often knows more about how to educate the children they are responsible for than any self appointed expert in “education.”
Richard Feynman pointed this phenomenon out 40 years ago in his famous “cargo cult” speech. He stated:
So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you’ll see the reading scores keep going down—or hardly going up—in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There’s a witch doctor remedy that doesn’t work. It ought to be looked into: how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress—lots of theory, but no progress—in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.
Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way—or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn’t do “the right thing,” according to the experts.
What we are seeing is not the “death of experts.” We are seeing people no longer being intimidated by pseudoscience and rejecting the claim that even real expertise in a subject confers moral authority over the decisions made relating to that subject.
Published in General
Although I do not disagree with your thesis, I’m not sure that it’s particularly fair to include Nichols’ book in the mix. I have admittedly not read it, but did listen to him for an hour on a podcast from The Federalist. He is not talking about phony or self-styled experts, but genuine ones who have an undeniable command of their subject matter and limit themselves to what they know. His gripe seems to be that people who have little to no subject matter expertise think that they are self-actualized enough to get in the ring with someone who actually knows what they are talking about.
For the most part I agree with John. He’s right; overreach is the problem here. If an eminent scientist predicts that humans can be safely sent through the Van Allen belts, and no one in his field disagrees, I’d listen to him. On the other hand, if he says we shouldn’t fund space travel because we haven’t achieved harmony on Earth, that’s a value judgment in which he brings no special expertise. We see a lot of that these days. Tightening the screws on acceptable debate is the result.
But Hoyacon’s right too. If there’s no reason to listen to so-called experts operating outside of their field, there’s still every reason to listen to them when they are in fact operating within the boundaries of their competence.
One of the less attractive aspects of racial conflict in the Sixties and afterwards was the number of flat-cold-stone-dead untruths that became urban fact: that Black women are being gang raped in the basement of the 40th Precinct. That the CIA created crack to enslave the ghettos. That a wartime explosion on the Oakland waterfront was a secret nuclear detonation meant to kill minorities. You’d have to be crazy to believe this stuff. But for many, it became a case of where there’s smoke there’s fire.
I hate to see this happen to the Right as well. Dubious stuff becomes treated as long-established fact. “Hillary had Vince Foster killed to protect the cocaine smuggling ring at Mena airport!” “There were 747-loads of WMD flown out of Baghdad! I know a guy who knew a guy who saw the plane!” “Trump actually got millions more votes than Hillary. It’s mathematically proven.”
A big question is defining who is an expert in a given field. I just was looking on google books at a new book which has a chapter on GPS. It’s by a guy with a Ph.D. in the history of science from Harvard. Some people would consider him an expert, but he’s got some major things wrong. I don’t have a Ph.D. But I know more than he does about the history of GPS. It’s hard for a layperson to evaluate knowledge of a subject. In the debate on Obamacare in 2009-2010, it was clear that many supposed experts were lying to the public.
And then when you add in the proliferation of research fraud…
These two observations would seem to be at least somewhat mutually contradictory:
I’m not saying there isn’t middle ground between “only knows how not to kill the patient” and “can assign a given price increase to a specific policy”, of course, just that it might be hard to occupy both extremes at once.
I am probably giving economics too much credit in saying they can predict the price increase.
John, your comment #6 above is lost in MFR’s — if you edit the comment and select just your latest comment notice that the double quotes in the formatting bar above is highlighted:
Click on that double quotes button and your comment will move to the left and it won’t be mixed up with MFR’s anymore.
[edit from Max: I fixed John’s comment for him]
I’m only half-economist, but this would have been my objection to the statement, as well.
Here is the problem, as I teach my students. So many experts try to handle their principles (eg, staffers manipulating their congressmember) that the principles -that’s us -learn to assume that all experts are handling them. Sure, pulling a “black and blacker” gambit works. Once. You tell the Member that they must do this or bad things happen (TARP, for example), and when asked for alternatives, you come back and say “well, we could do this other thing, but that would collapse the economy and horrible things would happen.”
But the second time (ObamaCare), the lesson the Member learns is that the experts are liars, even in their fields. They will hide options, downplay bad results, or shade the truth in order to get their way -what John’s calling moral authority, and what I call Democratic Legitimacy.
So even those experts who do tell the truth cannot be trusted -because the liars act the same way.
Which is why Instapundit rightly calls it expert suicide.
Great post, John. Thanks for thinking so hard for the rest of us on this important topic.
It’s kind of like mission creep, isn’t it? It breaks down into two categories:
Politics thrown into the mix just makes it thornier. I’ve always thought of the effect of politics on a subject as being like nitro-methane as an additive into gas engines. Very unpredictable things happen but when the country really wants to do something (like after Pearl Harbor or 9/11) then all roadblocks are smashed.
And add in controversy and this supercharges the debate about even prosaic things.
As a small follow-up to my earlier post, I wanted to note the subtitle to Nichols’ book as well. “Established knowledge” is just that, and those who possess it are worth listening to. It’s unfortunate that Wilsonian progressives have given expertise a bad name. But I still have my electrician’s number on the fridge.
Here’s where politics makes things confusing, though: global warming (and all its attendant wild claims) IS established knowledge.
It seems we need experts on expertise nowadays. Well, that’s what we call common sense, isn’t it?
Generally speaking, I agree with your premise. Let me add two points, though:
Who, whom?
Minor quibble: It is really too neutral to say it’s expert suicide because we all know that the big problem is the selection of theses experts by the media.
(John, I hope you don’t see this as a digression.)
There are specialists who know a lot more than most of us about the area of their special study and experience, and there are people with good judgement and wisdom, but in things human there are no experts in the sense that some dominate knowledge relevant to the subject at hand. We all have to take most of the important matters on faith and sorting it out will always be a challenge for all of us. Over confidence in ones area of knowledge quickly leads to hubris and error.
My view on global warming is that it is not established, not that we should doubt even though it is established. The politics enter because we are made to think that it is established, when in fact there’s room for debate. Nichols’ concerns, I believe, center on areas where there is established scholarship, but which are challenged because “Hey, my opinion is just as good as yours.”
The problem is deciding where there is established scholarship. The Left would have you believe that their views are based on scholarship whereas conservative opinions are not. AGW is not settled science IMO but they assert that it is. We’ve all seen academics pretend that their opinions are settled science.
And of course, it’s been said many times over the last few years: it is preposterous in science to call any theory settled — that is a tell that the person pushing it has an agenda based on passion because only a fool would propose it. But, let’s say that some theories are settled — if so, these are not to be found in new areas of science. We need some context and historical reflection and vigorous debate and that takes many years — counted in centuries or at least many decades.
Let’s look at the vaccination “controversy.” Am I going to listen to an expert or am I going to listen to Jenny McCarthy? I know the issue is more complex, but often it does in fact come down to something like that.
Well, since the “experts” are so often pseudo-scientists who claim moral authority, are we not agreed is that this is the “death of experts”, or, perhaps, the “death of expertise”?
What we feel is certain; what we know is uncertain.
It is the death of trust.
Western scientists, through hard work, insight, perseverance and serendipity brought forth a staggering advance to the amount of knowledge in many fields. A huge balance of trust and goodwill was established.
In recent decades we have seen that balance drawn down by slippery, duplicitous work that was passed off with the imprimatur of “science.” We have been burned so many times that the account is now nearly empty.
This provides a pretty good example. Jenny McCarthy had a plausible sounding argument with experts of her own to back it up. A bunch of doctors who are invested in vaccines (because they administer and develop them), scientists who are invested in government public health via mandated vaccines, and other interested parties promptly declared her a heretic and started lighting torches.
This did not actually make me feel better that we’d actually investigated what, if any, connection there was between vaccines and autism.
Other scientists -who didn’t get a lot of airtime on TV -pointed out the flaws in her argument. That as near as we can tell, autism rates aren’t increasing in reality, we’re just diagnosing it more (so much so, some are arguing that we’re really just diagnosing “Y-Chromosomes” and calling it autism). Still others pointed out that the chemical that was supposed to provide the causal link wasn’t being used in vaccines any more. And still others argued that, even if it were borne out, the number of vaccines given and the number of autism cases meant the risk was abysmally low -compared to the known benefits -still justifying mandatory vaccines. That satisfied me.
Again, what do you do when two supposed experts clash. At the Vanguard 1 50th anniversary celebration, Dad talked about how John Perlin claimed to be the expert on Vanguard’s solar cells. He pointed out errors in Perlin’s account and mentioned that Perlin did not speak with the two people (Dad and Marty Votaw, both present) who designed the solar cells.
i think the clash between the Trump and NT supporters on this website also has aspects of the argument over expertise. Most of the people on the podcasts are NT. Some of them seem frustrated that Trump supporters don’t recognize their supposed expertise.
Wonderful, wonderful post. “Global warming, i.e. Climate change” take notice.
I enjoyed this one. Thanks.
Well, what also bothers me is when experts … who have consistently been proven wrong … are still entrenched in the role of “expert” and they still expect the rest of us to be guided by them. In fact, they demand the privilege of authority. Think “mainstream media.” Think political parties. Think of the “intelligence community” or “leading economists.” Or if nothing else, think film critics.
When the “authorities” retain their roles, despite a track record of error and failure, it leads to the inevitable conclusion that the position of expert has nothing to do with actual expertise. Instead, authority isn’t what you know but who you know.
Unfortunately there is not much tolerance these days for debating the particular details of AGW theory. The media’s discussion of the issue is too shallow to wet your toenails. Either you accept the entire thing as “settled”, or you’re a Big Oil-funded climate denier. There is plenty in the climate science to disagree about though.
Some parts of the theory are well established — the temperature record shows an increase since the invention of the thermometer. Carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation and helps keep the Earth warmer than it would otherwise be. More CO2 will warm the atmosphere to an extent, and with logarithmic effect (i.e. diminishing returns). To refute these would require extraordinary evidence.
Other parts of the package are not well established — that CO2 is the primary driver of a rising global thermal equilibrium, that man-made CO2 is furthermore the primary component of this effect, that there are massive positive feedback systems that will amplify the modest CO2 warming into something 3, 5, or 10 times greater, that this is in turn causing/will cause increases in “extreme” weather events, and that it will have a generally catastrophic effect on the entire planet’s biosphere which can’t be adapted to and is so terrible it would justify sinking trillions of dollars of wealth into preventative measures. Unfortunately these relatively tenuous and politicized aspects of the theory are sold silently as a package deal with the established part of the science. You’re generally not permitted to challenge these less well-established parts of the theory in polite company.
This is an example of how, as John wrote, different types of “expertise” get chained together to browbeat us all into taking certain actions.
When discussing economists and economics, it’s useful to remember an important distinction.
Microeconomics: pretty solid.
Macroeconomics: cargo cult science or voodoo.
I remember asking my UofC-trained husband, “Does macroeconomics even exist?” He got a chuckle out of that.