I believe in domain competence and even domain expertise. Yet I have spent a great deal of my life listening to legitimate experts in one field speak as if they were therefore near-experts in another. My PCP forty years ago tried to insist on a very familiar, but nonetheless overexcited interpretation of 1 Cor 6:19 ("Actually Phil, I very seldom sleep with temple prostitutes"*). Psychologists are notorious for making half-baked social and political pronouncements, clergy try to pass themselves off as experts on economics. I am not expansive in what I count as expertise on a subject. I have spent too much time explaining mental health law to attorneys or acute psychiatric emergencies to growth mindset psychologists for that. Paul Krugman knows more than the average bear on economics in general, but he is only an expert in a narrow area. He overreaches, as most economists do.
The suicide of expertise I have faulted Glenn Reynolds for his harping on the squandering of credibility by medical experts during Covid, when he was one of the first to start undermining it - and not always accurately. But the date of this essay is 2017, so I have to acknowledge that this did not come out of the blue for him as a political convenience in 2020. I have to give him more of a pass on the dangers of overreliance on expertise than I thought.
By its fruit the tree is known, and the tree of expertise hasn’t been doing well lately (2017). As Nassim Taleb recently observed: “With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers.”
I'm not sure I would go quite that far. Grandmothers taught you not to go swimming for an hour after eating, and night air was bad air. We have conveniently forgotten that some of the traditional wisdom was unutterably stupid, because it is so much fun to tell the opposite story.
I am a talented amateur on a lot of subjects, but I don't think I would any longer call myself an expert even in the field I worked in for forty years.
*Be it noted that I do believe the verse can be understood to include a lot of sexual behavior. I think it can be an influence on an overall approach to behavior. But for risky behavior, nutrition, drinking and smoking, cosmetics and body-focus - I think it is a serious overclaim.
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Grandmothers might also say that there was "bad blood" in a family, pointing to some unfortunate tendencies in the ancestors of that love interest.
"We have conveniently forgotten that some of the traditional wisdom was unutterably stupid"
Are we sure about that? Perhaps the context has been forgotten. Waiting an hour to swim had to do resources going to digestion, so not to muscles. Grandmothers did not make up that precaution.
My neighbor is 96 years, and recently told me that he is beginning to feel old. He recommends cobwebs and turpentine for skin wounds and abrasions. If that was ever good advice, we have other options now.
Glenn Reynolds didn't undermine the credibility of experts, they did that to themselves. He just called it out before Covid, when it wasn't so obvious.
Experts may not be wise, have a broad view, or be impartial. Bill Nye taught us that, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." The expert should not expect us to defer to his expertise.
Be skeptical of expert who is 100% certain about an issue that has broad support on both sides.
Be skeptical of an expert who isn't prepared to explain why this thing works and why it is beneficial.
Be skeptical of an expert who isn't willing to address, in good faith, every criticism. None of this, "that was explained many times already". I always think, when? Post a link, provide a reference.
Be skeptical of an expert who prefers coercion to persuasion.
Glenn is right about, "By its fruit the tree is known".
Medical experts have no trouble convincing people to get a knee replacement or take prescription antibiotics, because everyone sees that these work.
If parents are reluctant to get their kids vaccinated, it's because medical experts are untrustworthy.
The Covid vaccine doesn't work the way vaccines were commonly understood to work. Experts conflated the Covid vaccine with familiar vaccines. That was dishonest and disrespectful.
Medical experts would not accept that there was a risk to the Covid vaccine. Parents don't accept that they are honest about other risks.
Medical experts never explained why children should get the Covid vaccine when there was little risk it would help them.
Most parents aren't against childhood vaccinations, but question why there are so many. Medical experts treat them like that's a crazy opinion, rather than engage in good faith.
Sorry to go to Covid for the examples, but that experience provided obvious examples of the expertise problem that Reynolds was talking about in 2017.
Trying to transfer your expertise too far is how Immanuel Velikovsky worked. If you don't recognize the name, back in the mid-20th century, he put forward a theory that the miracles and catastrophes of the Bible and parallel events in other myth and history were because, long ago, Venus erupted from Jupiter, had some near-misses with Earth, then knocked Mars out of orbit, which had some more near-misses, before both settled down into their current circular orbits.
Fast-forward a few decades. Carl Sagan is at an academic cocktail party, and a historian tells him about Velikovsky, remarking that the history was idiotic but maybe Sagan would be interested in the astronomical aspect. Sagan was struck by the remark, since he knew the astronomy to be idiotic but had thought the historical aspect sounded interesting.
Velikovsky could sound interesting and plausible if you didn't know enough.
Velokovsky's own field was psychoanalysis, and he put the rejection of his ideas down to psychiatric causes.
(See "Immanuel Velikovsky," "Worlds in Collision," and "Ages in Chaos" in Wikipedia.)
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