The attack on expertise
How ludicrous it is that what Adam Frank says needs to be said:
The attack on expertise was given its most visceral form by British politician Michael Gove during the Brexit campaign last year when he famously claimed, “people in this country have had enough of experts.” The same kinds of issues, however, are also at stake here in the U.S. in our discussions about “alternative facts,” “fake news” and “denial” of various kinds. That issue can be put as a simple question: When does one opinion count more than another?
By definition, an expert is someone whose learning and experience lets them understand a subject deeper than you or I do (assuming we’re not an expert in that subject, too). The weird thing about having to write this essay at all is this: Who would have a problem with that? Doesn’t everyone want their brain surgery done by an expert surgeon rather than the guy who fixes their brakes? On the other hand, doesn’t everyone want their brakes fixed by an expert auto mechanic rather than a brain surgeon who has never fixed a flat?
To put it more broadly, doesn’t everyone grasp that people who know more about X know more about X than people who don’t know more about X? It’s tautologous because what else can it be? If you’re dissing expertise you’re saying there’s no value in knowing more about X no matter what X is, and that’s just bonkers.
(I know this because I’m an expert in spotting when things are bonkers.)
Every day, all of us entrust our lives to experts from airline pilots to pharmacists. Yet, somehow, we’ve come to a point where people can put their ignorance on a subject of national importance on display for all to see — and then call it a virtue.
Bonkers.
There are non-bonkers reasons for wanting things like fresh perspectives, people with no vested interest in X, outsiders, rebels, and so on…but there are no non-bonkers reasons for just opposing expertise as such, or for pretending ignorance is a virtue.
How did we reach this remarkable state of affairs? The answer to that question can be found in a new book by Tom Nichols titled The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Nichols is a politically conservative professor of international relations at the U.S. War College. (He’s also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion, so you don’t wanna mess with him.)
First, it’s important to note, Nichols is not arguing for a slavish adherence to anything that comes out of an expert’s mouth. In a wonderful essay that preceded the book, he tells us: “It’s true that experts can make mistakes, as disasters from thalidomide to the Challenger explosion tragically remind us.”
But it wasn’t the experts who made the mistake that caused the Challenger explosion. Quite the opposite: it was management who overruled the experts. NASA management overruled the engineers who said it was not safe to launch when the temperature was too low. The engineers had the relevant expertise and the management simply said but we really really want to launch so we’re going to ignore the engineers. That didn’t go well.
I heard Tom Nichols being interviewed on RNZ last week. Fascinating. If the book is as good as the interview it will be well worth getting.
You are indeed. I think you may have a Ph.D. in bonkers-spotting from the University of Nonsense Debunking.
I wish more people understood this. I read a lot of science-based plays for my MFA thesis on science onstage, and they were so anti-expert it was frightening. They seemed to think all science is physics, all physics is bomb-building, and they seem to forget (1) the scientists didn’t actually drop the bomb, and in fact recommended it be dropped somewhere uninhabited; and (2) everyone at that time wanted the war to end, so the scientists were working on a goal that was seen (however misguidedly) as a noble, virtuous one. In short, it is often what society does with the science.
But it’s this sort of attitude that has given us Jennie McCarthy and Jim Carrey as voices that can overrule those of doctors – they have the “human” touch, or so I’m told.
And it’s in this sort of a world that the uninformed opinions of my students can allow them to deny that I have any knowledge when I teach them about evolution or global warming, because they have been told by non-scientists that neither of these things are valid. I may be an expert, but that is an immediate reason to automatically dismiss what I say. As an expert, I am the enemy.
I really don’t get it either… I mean I have the (misguided) contempt for engineers that comes from both being a liberal arts major and a welder, but I still expect them to do a better job calculating what kind of loads a structure will bear and the most efficient way to layout pipes etc…
Welders don’t expect some rando to lay in good welds and yet they are also the types that are immediately skeptical of those who know more than them in any field not related to welding or the trades in general… it boggles the mind and honestly I hate them, even the ones I like…
I have a lot of sympathy for this idea, but don’t find Nichols’ essay very persuasive–whether it’s true or not, he sounds like someone who doesn’t actually care about other people’s experiences, and isn’t interested in learning or understanding any more than he already knows. I won’t take it apart bit by bit; I’ll just highlight one parenthetical sentence as an example:
‘The verb to disrespect is one of the most obnoxious and insidious innovations in our language in years, because it really means “to fail to pay me the impossibly high requirement of respect I demand.”’
If he’d done a little reading on the subject he’s writing about he’d be familiar with the fact that in general discourse two definitions of ‘respect’ are being deployed at cross-purposes. There’s the basic ‘respect’ all people are entitled to regardless of innate characteristics, and the ‘respect’ (allegedly) owed to ‘superior’ people by ‘inferior’ people; the fact that he appears to conflate the two implies to me that he himself, on the right side of most privilege axes, doesn’t personally perceive much of a problem with the former.
I do like this sentence though: ‘But if you have neither education nor experience, you might want to consider exactly what it is you’re bringing to the argument.’
Whether its Jenny McCarthy, Noam Chomsky, or Bill O’Reilly, we seem to have a culture where ‘experts’ of SOME types receive absolute faith where none is earned.
The ‘bubble’ mentality is pervasive, though it is more visible on the far-Right. Progressive discourse is absolutely riddled with woo, antirationalism, and a kind of 3rd world ‘blut und boden’ devotion to arcadian fantasy.
I think a lot of the hostility to experts comes from the fact that genuine experts so often tell us things we don’t want to hear.
And often, their advice is couched in terms of statements like “this is complicated”, “there’s no cheap solution”, “anecdotes are not data”, “to really understand this you have to do the math”, and “while it seems like that would help, in fact, it doesn’t, but this thing you don’t want do would help.”
There is the issue of determining whether someone claiming expertise in a subject really does know much more than oneself about that subject. Deepak Chopra & Lawrence Krauss can both claim to be expert on quantum mechanics, but only one of them does have much more knowledge about that than I do (BSc physics). If I didn’t have that much education in the subject I might get taken in by Deepak.
I know that alt-facts are all the rage but that’s not what Gove said. What he said was: “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong”, and in context it was clear he was talking about economics experts. That’s quite a bit different. He was talking about one particular class of experts with a particularly bad track record (namely economists who make macro-economic predictions). He was not talking about experts in general or expertise in general.
I agree with Coel that Gove’s statement has been cherry-picked then abridged, so that what people think he meant is something very different to what he actually intended. On the other hand, we really are surrounded by people who think that they know better than experts in every field. Unfortunately, it’s because those who are least educated have seen the least portion of the great scope of potential knowledge.
Those who remain in the burrow can know everything that there is to know about the burrow and remain completely unaware that there is a world beyond the burrow. Those who struggle to the top of the highest hill, upon seeing the mountains in the distance, admit openly that they know but a minute fraction of what there is to learn. Hearing the admission of experts that they know very little, the burrow-dwellers-who-know-everything are of course going to feel superior, and that they have a right to pontificate. They don’t realise that their knowing 100% of almost nothing does not come close to the knowledge contained in less than 1% of near infinity.
I read “Scientists aren’t stupid, and science deniers are arrogant” recently, and it covers the same subject rather well.