Phantoms...who had faced the journey to the bus stop-perhaps for them it was thousands of miles-and come up to the country of the Shadow of Life and limped far into it over the torturing grass, only to spit and gibber out in one ecstasy of hatred their envy and (what is harder to understand) their contempt, of joy. The voyage seemed to them a small price to pay if once, only once, within sight of that eternal dawn, they could tell the prigs, the toffs , the sanctimonious humbugs, the snobs, the "haves," what they thought of them. CS Lewis The Great Divorce Ch 9
I am hearing too much of this anger against experts and authorities not because they have been wrong nor even because they have lied or slyly deceived, but because they are perceived as arrogant - and some of them certainly are. I believe in disruption, but not all disruption. Bilbo thought that an invasion of dragons might be good for the people of the Shire, but in the end only indirectly upset their applecarts. Are we silently cheering on RFK Jr only because he is making The Experts uncomfortable? If you think you have better reasons, what are they? He is more arrogant than they. When challenged he changes the subject and counteraccuses. When he says that relying on experts is not science, that is "a truth that people use to lie with," as a psychiatrist friend of mine used to say. Those words are true, but he expands that into "I don't have to listen to anyone," like a schoolgirl slamming the door to her room. Science means trying to get it right, not just mocking experts. After all, if you are the experts now, what is to stop people from mocking you when the dead are counted, with even more justification?
He has the facts largely wrong. Even a blind pig finds a truffle once in a while, but when challenged on medical knowledge he will respond that Big Pharma contributes lots of money to politicians. He is providing the explanation for why they would be wrong if they were wrong, but has evaded the part where he shows they are wrong. Maybe the setback on deaths from measles or rubella will not be extensive. Perhaps the number of people who died needlessly will be small, with only a few unheard people carrying tragedy for the rest of their lives. Maybe we bounce back quickly.
I worked with doctors and researchers my whole career, and a lot of them are arrogant and know less than they think. They can be disdainful. If you are not prepared they can make you feel bad. I don't know that much about experts in other fields, but I have seen the acrimonious, even career-destroying arguments between opposing camps in a half-dozen fields. Childish, illogical, unfairly argued, corrupt - and somehow we have more knowledge about many things than when I was a boy. How did that happen? Was all of it from tearing down and disrupting? Did that fix everything?
Maybe I'm just reading the wrong people.
6 comments:
It seems you provided the answer to your questions in this statement
Childish, illogical, unfairly argued, corrupt - and somehow we have more knowledge about many things than when I was a boy.
I immediately thought of the now oft-told story of the doctor who struggled for years to get the medical community to accept that ulcers were caused by infections in the stomach, not "stress". I'm sure he looked like an illogical crank to everybody who accepted the conventional wisdom despite having plenty of data. And before you say it, yeah, that doesn't mean everybody who looks like an illogical crank actually has some hidden knowledge but it does indicate that knowledge often advances because of people who look like that.
That statement also looks a lot more like the arguments were over who has control than over who has better data.
The thing about experts is that you can't really identify them unless you are an expert in the subject yourself. If you put ten people in front of me talking about something I don't know much about, I can listen for a while and try to judge who is 'the real expert,' but my ability to do so effectively is going to be limited to heuristics. Some of those are less reliable than others.
I'm trained in logic, so I can identify when a claimant is using fallacies; that's a very reliable heuristic. If they're not doing that, though, one of the usual ones is reputation -- and that is often just a mask for popularity, or consensus, which in scientific fields is often unreliable.
It's especially unreliable if the consensus is based on the fact that they larger faction shares a common motivation such as prestige, power, or money. Then the most reputable and famous will often be the one who has reliably led the others to piles of money. The argument from 'a lot of money' is cutting because we know it is true, at least to some degree, based on clear examples. The way our culture adopted sugary breakfast cereals as an ideal breakfast for children -- who will then be shipped on buses to schools where they will be forced to sit still all day -- was because of the industry hiring studies done. Orange juice is the same thing: nobody drank the stuff before the 20th century, but it became a marketing campaign backed by studies that focused on Vitamin C (beneficial!) and ignored the heavy sugar content.
The way the tobacco industry dodged admission of cancer connections was similar.
So when someone points out that a whole lot of money is being spent by an industry, a lobbying group, etc., I tend to think that's a reasonably reliable heuristic. It should make us question the expertise of those on that side of the discussion. In the past, we've seen that it does often mislead even very large sections of the public and major public policy in the wrong direction.
RFK Jr. may be wrong about many things, and indeed he may be wrong about everything. But I'm willing to hear arguments of that sort because I'm aware of several clear instances in the past when they've been correct. It's just a heuristic, not a guarantee, but it marks a place where I think investigation and even suspicion often may be warranted.
Both good points, and sorry if I did not give enough attention to those ideas. I think there is a difference though. Lawrence Keeley, who wrote "War Before Civilization" was considered a renegade, a crank but his ideas have become an entire side of the argument in anthropology. Joseph Greenberg is still disdained by many linguists because he saw connections between languages that they thought deeply unproven and theorised about larger groupings and even evidence of a Proto-World language. Genetics has been spectacularly kind to his theories, long after he is gone. Such things happen in every field. But those advances are nearly always from insider rebels, not outsiders. Linus Pauling was a Nobel winner in one field, but set us back in the interface between supplements and medicine. Semmelweis was a physician.
The insiders also produce cranks whose theories do not pan out. But the outsiders have an especially poor record of producing cranks whose theories do not pan out. The example I chose, RFK Jr is in the news at the moment. He is not a renegade expert. His CDC choice may be. I'd like to listen to that one when he's not under political pressure. Rachel Carson was a sincere activist who picked up on a growing idea of pesticides being dangerous and made it internationally important. Environmentalists still glow talking about her. But she was an outsider and set the whole movement on a footing of supposition and accusation before research.
I'm angry with a good part of the expert class precisely because they have been deceptive, and smug while they were at it. When an argument doesn't hold water, I have little patience with being told I should swallow it because my expert credentials aren't up to snuff. Whatever a failed expert's credentials look like, if his arguments are trashy, the credentials won't save him. All he's doing is making people less likely to trust the next guy with credentials, and more like to say "verify."
The alt-medicine industry also makes a lot of money, which often goes unnoticed by those who hate Big Pharma. Other outsider experts sell books, run workshops, and now make fortunes on social media. I agree about the piles of money, but that's a game that everyone plays.
True, but on a so-much smaller scale that it doesn't replicate. If you're leading people to USG funding, or major NGOs that are funded by several governments, or mega-corporations with millions to spend, you can build a very powerful reputation among a lot of different people. You'll already have made your nest, and be able to lead others to nest-building funding streams of their own. They'll owe you and also want more, so they'll praise you.
If you are by contrast doing alt-health, you're pulling some money from housewives and dudes who spend too much time on Facebook or X; the pool is so much smaller that you're going to end up in competition with the alt-health people as much as you're assisting each other. These people often end up assassinating each other's character because they're trying to snake some of the one guy's followers into their pockets instead. "No, not mushroom coffee! Try my peptide-filled pills! That's what'll really make you feel like you're 25 again."
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