Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
I had a similar reaction when I heard him on the podcast. I was not terribly impressed with the ideas expressed (though I did think it was cool that he came on).
I work with way too many “experts” (and am one myself!) to buy what he was suggesting.
Thomas Sowell wisely observed there is rarely any price to be paid by any intellectual “expert” who is proven to be wrong.
If a master plumber ruins your home with shoddy work, he can be sued and put out of business.
If a PhD in economics is totally wrong and contributes to mass economic ruin – they get tenure.
I agree that we’re talking about (at least) two different things:
Both of these are dangerous, for the reasons everyone has has already discussed.
Also, expanding on @sabrdance and @mjbubba comments, I think there’s a way in which each of those patterns reinforces and accelerates the other. For example:
You can vary the particular moral you want to emphasize by starting the cycle in different points, but the overall pattern remains.
The first company I worked at was headquartered in Princeton, NJ. As such, there were quite a few Princeton grads in that office. We were in a branch office in Dallas.
My old boss (himself a graduate of the Dallas Tabulating Institute) had a great description of some of our Princeton cow-orkers:
“educated beyond their intelligence.”
That’s been a very useful phrase in my career and I think well describes many of the people who consider themselves experts these days.
This is endemic in the Information Technology realm. Since we digital shamen (sorry, that’s cisnormative, shapeople) can make the strange and curious glowing box bend to our will, surely our preternatural expertise applies to politics, religion, culture, and so forth.
Hence, Wired magazine.
I prefer the phrase “dumber than a box of rocks”.
There’s also “Couldn’t pour [urine] out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel”.
I think it is also important to point out that many “experts” are only self-appointed experts. This is especially true in the “social sciences.” So, counselors, drug/alcohol treatment providers, sociologists, etc… I’m not saying that these people are worthless, but a great deal of what many of them do depends on worldview, and is far more subjective than they are willing to acknowledge. Would an atheist recognize a Christian pastor as an expert in the field of spirituality? How about vise versa, should a Christian trust an atheist counselor? What about an expert in women’s studies or black history?
It is a long-running problem I’ve got with this demand to “trust the experts” when I don’t acknowledge that they have any legitimate expertise.
I very often use this analogy – in the courtroom, I am an expert, right? The judge is an expert. Opposing counsel is an expert. Yet we all disagree. Supposedly, we’re all experts in the field of law, and supposedly, what we’re disagreeing on is the facts. You’d be hard-pressed to find any expert on facts, except when it comes to engineers, architects, plumbers… but I don’t think this is the sort of expert that Nichols is referring to when he says we need to trust experts more. Therein lies the problem. Experts (even STEM experts) are actually extremely limited in what they actually know, but once they label themselves as “experts” they begin doing as Nichols seemed to be doing, thinking that they need to be trusted outright. As has likely been observed a dozen times on this thread alone, when an electrician tells me “you’ve got a short,” I should trust him. When he says “you’re a bad father,” I have no reason whatsoever to trust him. There are precious few “experts” who really understand the difference between their legitimate expertise and their own egos. That’s why we don’t trust them. And I think Nichols severely underestimates the cause for not trusting them. He attributes it to arrogance or stubbornness on the parts of non-experts. Quite the opposite. They deserve to be trusted even less than we actually do.
I’ve cited this before, but here’s an example of my taking on an expert about GPS. The layperson has to decide who is making the better arguments. Most of the time, experts can be found who will argue both sides of an issue.
Lots of thoughtful relevant comments above. This one is just a ramble.
During years in law biz (including a stint as a lobbyist), I have seen lots of litigation where one lawyer is, in essence, claiming his whore (expert) is better that the other’s side’s whore. A similar pattern exists in many policy debates. Expertise is surprisingly malleable to fiduciary or partisan interests. The wholesale sellout of climate science to the very well-funded alarmism industry is exhibit #10,854.
I have a pet theory that much of the intellectual dynamism of the West stemmed from the notion of Unity of Knowledge as articulated by Thomas Aquinas: Nothing that is true contradicts anything else that is true. Aquinas would say that if you think, for example, that math proves the bible false (or vice versa) then the problem is your understanding of these things rather than a real contradiction. A simultaneous, honest devotion to both reason and humility makes it all operate rightly in pursuit of truth, science and the good.
Much of modern social science “expertise” began a disingenuous assault on religion and culture and has devolved into an anti-rational tribalism in which the tribe that owns the college campus is an infallible Consensus, contrary views and reason itself be damned.
The “expert” we resent is not one of us who happens to be well-versed in a discipline but one of them using unmoored “method” to attack who we are for malevolent purposes.
That’s an important point: e.g., that even within a genuine expertise, there is always disagreement over important matters. And, more importantly, most people outside of the expertise are unaware of these divisions.
Again, this is not to say that the expertise is worthless, only that it’s limited.
I wonder if there’s a perception that the STEM fields should naturally have more agreement, perhaps because of the notion that “math problems have one right answer”. But on questions of basic fact where there is universal agreement, expertise isn’t needed. (One could even argue that by definition it doesn’t exist, but that’s a separate discussion.) Controversial questions in engineering are often arguments about which is the most significant among several identified problems, or what is the “best” way to solve a problem, whether you will regret this expedient decision later*, what is the level of acceptable risk, or if a particular solution is going to work as expected. These often hinge on subjective judgments based on experience where analysis and testing techniques fall short of providing a concrete answer.
One defining characteristic of expertise is the ability to form and articulate an informed and independent opinion based on your own competent assessment of the situation. Which probably goes a long way to explaining why experts disagree on the things they are mutually experts on.
*Aside: A former colleague of mine loved to say about short-sighted expediency, “We don’t have enough time to do this the quick way. We don’t have enough money to do this the cheap way.”
All too true.
Even fields that one would imagine as more rigorous are rife with bogus research.
One nice feature of these fields is that many of the predictions are falsifiable. “We’ll do such and such and the building won’t fall down.” Maybe it will or maybe it won’t, and it’s possible you might get the right answer for the wrong reason, but you generally have to make a prediction that can be observed and verified.
This is in opposition to more nebulous fields, where people can spout off ideas and the correctness is in the interpretation.
A rather frightening, absolutely true story:
I recently retired from a 30+ year career as a tenured professor. When I was first hired, I was invited to fill out a questionnaire from our local newspaper and television stations, asking in what areas I considered myself an expert, so they could contact me for interviews concerning various issues, should they arise. The questionnaire did not ask for the specifics concerning my degrees or areas of research. It was completely self-report.
And that, apparently, is how one becomes an expert.
(By the way, I told the media I was not an expert and to never contact me…and they didn’t. But this position was discussed more than once at professional reviews.)