The Self-Inflicted Death of Expertise

Once again your esteemed host has proven himself to be a moron. I’ve not bookmarked or otherwise recorded the links to any, except one, of the articles I’ve been reading on this topic over the last few weeks. Sigh.

I suppose I could spend the day finding most of them, but life’s just way too short and whilst references are certainly useful (and standard practice) you’re just going to have to trust me. Because I’m an expert¹.

There’s a lot of discussion at the moment about the ‘populist’ attitude - usually ascribed to the ‘right’ - about how experts are mistrusted and automatically assumed to be wrong. Things like ‘common sense’ and (what is assumed to be) a superficial understanding are being touted by these dumb ‘right-wing’ folk, allegedly, as being superior to expertise.

There’s some truth in that. But there is, perhaps, a spectrum in operation here².

Should we trust experts? It depends. And there are several factors at play.

For any new readers, and for some context, I would a while back have been classed as an ‘expert’. I’ve been out of the academic game for around 5 years now and I’m very rusty and have forgotten so much. I look back at my previous research notes and calculations and I’m really quite impressed with myself. Did I really understand all that? Was I capable of doing those technical calculations?

No longer, I’m afraid.

But my position on experts and ‘expertise’ has definitely shifted. I want to try and lay out the case here for why I think the ‘populist right’ aren’t quite as dumb as they’re being portrayed and why there are very good grounds, in many cases, for rejecting an automatic ‘trust’ of experts and expertise.

Credentialed Cretins and Credentialed Critics

Although there’s a reasonable correlation between credentials and genuine expertise, it’s by no means perfect. It never has been perfect, but I suspect it’s gotten a whole lot worse over the last 2 to 3 decades. In my previous article I talked about the possible decline of expected standards.

If it’s true, as has been reported, that in some courses students are handing in work generated by AI which is then assessed by the lecturer using AI, then what in the everloving fuck is a credential for this course telling us?

The move to different academic ‘assessment’ methods might look like a kindness - written in-person exams can indeed be brutal - but what is really being ‘assessed’ and are we confident that we’re actually assessing what we think we are? If I hand out an assessed homework, how can I be sure what I get back is the student’s work and only that student’s work³ ?

Credentials only make sense, and give us some guideline as to acquired expertise, if the standards are there to underwrite the credential. Is there gold in the vault to underpin the accounts or is it all just imaginary paper money? Are we constructing (or have we already constructed?) a kind of ‘fiat’ educational system?

I did a lot of interviewing for potential lecturers. Fully credentialed with several seemingly good academic papers on their CV⁴ (there was, after all, a reason they were being interviewed). It turned out to be relatively rare to find someone who could actually explain what they’d done and why it was either significant or something anyone would be interested in.

It’s amazing how far you can get with a question like “This paper seems really good, I’d love to know a bit more about it. Could you give me a bit of an overview of what you did and what’s most interesting about it?”

If they fail at this, something they’re supposed to be ‘expert’ in, then how on earth are they going to be able to communicate any understanding to students?

My favourite quote on the matter is “a rectal thermometer also has lots of degrees - and you know what you can do with one of those”

OK, so what, exactly, IS an expert?

Expertise exists in many forms. We don’t even need fancy training to spot it usually. The guy in the pub may not be a concert pianist but, damn, can he bash out a good boogie-woogie. Ethel round the corner makes the best cup cakes I’ve ever tasted. The alien (he, surely, must have been an alien) who plastered my walls performed some sort of super-advanced technical wizardry that looked like magic and created a wall that appeared to be smooth at a microscopic level.

Just think about all the people you know who have genuine expertise. They may write well, or be able to raise a laugh to lift the most miserable of moods. They may have that knack of offering you wise words at exactly the moment you need them.

What is usually meant by ‘expert’ in the context it’s often used, particularly by the media or government, is a very specific form of expert, almost always ‘credentialed’, and almost always someone who has an academic background. These experts are almost always being used as some kind of prop to ‘prove’ a point.

Experts say . . . blah, blah, blah. Now be a good citizen and do what you’re told.

Those of us who have actually been through the academic mill have oodles of that lovely, juicy, lived experience, and consequently have an idea of what an academic expert ‘looks like’.

People who have not had such a rarefied experience don’t really have that ‘insider’s insight’ and get their idea of what an expert is and what an expert does, from things like media, movies, and documentaries and so on.

You’ll notice the typical media framing is along the lines of “Dr Foreheadslope, a researcher at Gobbledegook University, said that people who eat brownies tend to have sticky fingers”. The expectation here is that BEHOLD, the expert hath spoken and verily hath they delivered unto ye the truth.

Those of us with the academic training (and access to journals through their university) can read the papers of Dr Foreheadslope and come to some judgement. Maybe we come to the conclusion that, yes, he’s done some good work.

How is a ‘normal’ person supposed to be able to assess that? They have to rely on people they ‘trust’ - perhaps some other expert. Maybe they can rely on their own intuition, or maybe they just believe the media’s assessment of expertise.

There’s a disconnect here. Some of the articles I’ve recently read, most of them in fact, defend the notion of expertise and rightly state that there exist scientists who really know what they’re talking about, and it’s wrong to cavalierly dismiss their expertise because you don’t like what they’re saying, or don’t understand it.

In the past I would have wholly endorsed this position and applied it across the board. These days I’m not quite as enthusiastic, and it very much depends on things like the actual subject area for which expertise is claimed, who is paying for the research, what political point is being made, and who is really benefitting from putting this person on the expert pedestal for all to see.

Our First Example

There’s a one word paragraph that pretty much sums everything up about why we’ve lost faith in experts and expertise. There are others, but the one I’m thinking of is this:

Masks

Had the experts studied this prior to covid? Yes, of course they had. It seems reasonable to suppose at first glance that such a thing would help to prevent infection by some airborne pathogen. The problem is that when that pathogen is an aerosolized virus the evidence base for their effectiveness was almost zero. Many RCT’s (randomized control trials) had been performed and almost all of them could detect no benefit whatsoever.

We knew, before covid, the experts knew before covid, that surgical masks as a means to prevent infection by an aerosolized virus were useless.

So when the policy wonks decided that masking was the thing that would save us all from the Great Cough of Calamity™ by rights there should have been expert after expert telling us this was nonsense. What did we get?

Crickets

Actually it was worse than crickets because we had plenty of people, some of whom with genuine expertise, telling us that masks were wonderful, the best thing we could do, and not only would they miraculously halt covid in its tracks, we’d also be spared from Ethel’s visage because although she makes awesome cupcakes her expertise doesn’t extend to her face.

Where were all the experts, experts who knew the science (the actual science and not the made up shit stuff the government promoted)? They were not in evidence.

Oh I suppose some local rag might have printed some anti-narrative counter view sandwiched in between the pet obituaries and the personals where you could be offered the full Greenwald service for a reasonable price, but the entirety of our media, their paid and unpaid experts, our governments and their paid experts, pretended that masks worked.

The Big Techy Twats like YouTube and the like got in on the act and vigorously censored videos that had the temerity to promote the actual science. Only government made up shit science was allowed. They did more than this - they removed entire accounts with no right of appeal.

European witch-hags called Ursula berated us and sonorously told us that although covid might wipe us out without masks, it was mis- and dis-information that was the real enemy. Meanwhile she and Albert were cosying up and making all sorts of shady deals behind closed doors.

The scientific journals refused to publish papers critical of masks. The science, you see, had definitely changed. That covid stuff was fucking amazing. Not only could it tell when you were standing up or sitting down in a restaurant without a mask, it even changed the laws of physics so that masks now worked.

Tell me, after this, why any of us should ever fully trust an ‘expert’ ever again?

Some have made the argument that what’s presented in the media and by government isn’t real science, which can only be found in the pages of august journals. But the journals themselves were terribly compromised. It was almost impossible to publish a paper critical of the prevailing narrative - a narrative that, in the case of masks, had changed overnight.

Taking a Peek Under the Skirt of Deception

Masks and their non-effectiveness against airborne viruses is an example of what is known as ‘hard’ science. It’s amenable to experiment and rigorous analysis. You can form hypotheses and test those ideas against reality. It’s mostly a physics problem dealing with the properties of aerosols and whether masks form an effective filtration device. Medical matters are only peripheral in that there needs to be some model of infection and whether, say, a 10% reduction in viral load entering the respiratory system makes a difference. Surgical masks, of course, get nowhere near even a 10% reduction.

For ‘hard’ science we can suppose the voice of an ‘expert’ ought to be listened to. I’m not going to listen to Arnold Wombatbrain from 22 Flat Earth Avenue when it comes to information transfer by quantum entangled particles am I? No, I’m going to listen to someone who’s spent his or her career studying such things professionally.

But what about ‘softer’ science? Or stuff that isn’t really within the purview of science (non-falsifiable by and large). You may claim expertise in Queer Performative Dance Seen Through a Marxist Lens but the rest of us know you’re only an ‘expert’ in meaningless shite.

The word expert, like an autogynephile’s skirt, covers a multitude of sins.

Michael Shermer’s article for Persuasion is an excellent read and immediately hits us with just a few (of very many) examples of ‘expert’ work and statements that get published. Shermer quotes Scientific American, once a really respected publication, as having an article that claimed

“inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.”

This is a science journal (albeit at a ‘popular’ level) ?

So, even those who may not have been through the full academic mill, those with an interest in science, are seeing ‘expert’ opinion that’s just silly and contrary to everything they can see with their own eyes.

And you think they should trust this just because it’s been written by some ‘expert’?

The experts are telling us that cutting the nads or tits of young boys and girls is absolutely essential for their health and wellbeing in that grotesquery known as “gender affirming care”. Chop bits off, pump them full of drugs and hormones, stop the disaster that is puberty. Why? Because we’re experts and know what’s best for kids.

How about you and I go and have a little chat with my good friend Mr Woodchipper?

Remember that we’ve been told to trust experts and expertise.

And then you have the ‘experts’ who promoted the food pyramid, or the diet-heart hypothesis, or thalidomide, or even “safe and effective” or any one of so many examples where the dozy fuckers known as ‘experts’ got it wrong.

But science is a self-correcting process, they say. Yes, it might be, but how many lives are you going to ruin by your misplaced confidence in these chumps whilst waiting for the science to come to its senses?

How many more examples with deadly consequences do we really need before we stop this nonsense of automatic trust in experts?

And then you have this kind of absolute fuckwittery, also referred to in Shermer’s article. The paper is about physics education. It’s published in The Physical Review which is a really highly respected physics publishing organisation. The paper’s title is Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study. It talks about how whiteboards are complicit

“with white organizational cultures, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.”

I was going to post the abstract, but I think figure 1 from this crazy shite masquerading as a serious paper is better

Ooh - a fancy ‘flowchart’ - must be some of that lovely sciency stuff, right?

No. It’s a barely disguised piece of political activism. It’s hiding its hateful boner under the costume skirt of acceptability. It is entirely deceptive in nature. It is pretending to be a serious piece of work, but it’s just dumb political activism.

Remind me again why we should be trusting experts?

You’re just picking the ripest cherries from under the skirt

That may be true, at least in the case of physics, but why are some of these articles published at all? They have no business in any serious publication that positions itself as scholarly. Oh censorship, you nasty authoritarian person. Nope - publish this drivel elsewhere. It’s not censorship when Physical Review Letters refuses to publish my article on “How Einstein’s Big Toenails Contributed to General Relativity”

They’re not, or shouldn’t be, in the business of publishing absolute shite. And that’s OK and not censorship. They shouldn’t be forced to have to bake the gay wedding cake, so to speak.

And it’s much, much worse in other fields. I’ve written before about the big annual get-together of the world’s anthropologists, for example. I only read the abstracts for the first day of this conference (I think it was the 2023 annual conference?) and it was page after page after page of the most appalling politically-driven meaningless crud. I’ve had bathroom disasters after a particularly vicious vindaloo that had more meaning.

The Inception of Perception

How do you tell whether the bearded bloke wearing a skirt to hide his meat and two veg, whilst claiming to be a woman, is a raging autogynephilic pervert getting himself off with his delusion and power to enter a woman’s intimate space?

Might it not actually be a sensitive soul who truly believes himself to be a woman and is just trying to live his authentic life?

You can’t tell.

I suppose you could face them ask them whether or not they’re a raging pervert, but that strategy probably won’t succeed.

So with this modern plethora of experts and expertise ranging from the guy who can demonstrate why quantum field theory is essential all the way through to some lunatic who tries to blame whiteboards for oppression, or thinks that men and women are only different because big, bad, nasty, oppressive, patriarchy made it so, how do you tell the difference?

Or worse, how do you tell whether a genuine expert is being pressured to present a particular view that he or she knows is a bit suspect?

The perception of scientists, in particular, and I think it’s one that has been carefully crafted and promoted, is one of almost super-human aloofness and objectivity, dispassionately questing after the truth and only presenting that truth to the best of their ability.

It’s a nice comforting fiction, but it’s a load of bollocks.

We are, by and large, approximately human. We’re as subject to petty jealousies, prejudices, power plays and back-stabbing as the rest of our fellow humans. There’s a basic trend of objectivity, that’s true, but all sorts of squishy emotive stuff gets in the way of that at times. And when you have to publish X articles per year to stay in your job, what do you think might happen?

This is how you can get a Chief Scientific Officer for the UK, the entire UK, a gold-plated bona-fide genuine expert with expert knobs and a side order of expert to tell the nation that playing Scrabble was dangerous because of the risk of contracting covid.

Ooh - let’s trust that expert shall we?

But this spineless freak was presented to the nation as the supreme expert, the ‘science’, and verily did we gaze upon his majestic visage and hark unto his words of wisdom and said . . .

You fucking what?

Will Garlic Suffice or Do I Need to Drive a Stake Through Its Heart?

At this point in time I don’t think there’s any easy answer to fix the damage done to experts as a result of their being used politically. It is self-inflicted because they allowed it to be done to them. For understandable reasons maybe. Some scientists do manage to appear normal enough for a sufficient period of time to attract a mate and have families to support as a result.

The default position of “trust the science” has been thoroughly discredited (as it should be). This is largely because, during covid, we were enjoined to trust something that was called “science” but was really just an outrageous basket of bullshit. The evidence, for example, for asymptomatic transmission of covid being a significant driver of infection is very weak, yet we were told all sorts of nonsense and it became a key plank in the oppressive measures that followed - none of which (surprise, surprise) worked.

If scientists had been more honest, more vocal in their opposition and refused to play the government game, things might have been different. We might still broadly trust them for all their flaws and weird personalities - at least when they talk about their own subject areas.

It is of course unrealistic to impose a standard of courage and bravery on scientists that most of the rest of the population couldn’t achieve, but nevertheless the end result has been something of an own goal. We no longer fully trust these buggers (and I am in the class of said buggers as an erstwhile genuine expert) and nor should we.

Actually, I think we built science and scientists and experts up far too much well before covid. We created a kind of fiction, a mythology, and it became a weapon for the unscrupulous during covid. As my mum used to say

The bigger they are, the harder they fall . . .

1. This is meant to be ironic

2. Now why would I use the the word ‘spectrum’ here? Am I possibly giving a tangential nod to certain acknowledged ‘experts’ who might use this term in some inappropriate context perhaps?

3. I sometimes gave out assessed homeworks. I stopped the practice when I discovered my questions had been submitted to a (paid) ‘answer site’ where students could pay to get their questions answered for them. I was actually OK with students working together to help each other understand the problem and solve it - indeed that was one of the intended purposes - as long as the answers were written out in the student’s own words and not just copied. I drew the line at paying someone, god knows where they were based, for those answers.

Sometimes they made it really too obvious. Perhaps they didn’t realize I could compare the quality of answers on quizzes and the like to the work they handed in. I had one really advanced calculation handed in that was so far above the student’s capability it was laughable. Although the answer was written by someone( I judged to be on some doctoral programme it actually turned out to be wrong - there was a slip in the fancy maths (so much for ‘paying’ for things). The student couldn’t explain the first thing about it when I asked.

4. Usually multi-authored. Which leads to further questions about how the whole system operates.