Anti-expertise is a symptom of Authoritarianism merely disguised as a symptom of ignorance: We need not and should not compete with our inexpert interpretations of climate science or social justice

I have been accused of arrogance, and there is some truth in the accusation. Not only do I not believe that all people have prepared equally to assess complex problems involving society, economics, history, and politics, much less laboratory science, but I think it is actually much safer to assume that very few of us can assess many problems outside our immediate and narrow areas of expertise.

If you have conducted any peer-reviewed, published research – or even if you have merely written a dissertation for a masters or doctoral degree – you are aware that a good dose of “critical thinking” and even more than a modicum of elbow grease do not get you very far. Great critical thinking skills are woefully insufficient to demonstrate capability with the methodologies of your chosen discipline, capacity to collect and assemble data appropriate for your hypotheses, then tease out special empirical and testing problems you face, find just the right statistical tests to apply, and then make sense of it all. Give me a genius with an IQ of 175 and I am quite confident that I can pose a problem that an ordinary graduate student with a couple of years of specialized training can solve faster and better. (There are types of problems the genius will solve better -- but they have little to do with 99% of research.) Give me an ordinary guy, earnest about being an honest citizen (rare these days), and he frankly doesn’t stand a chance.

Despite the widespread view disseminated on social media that "idiots" on the other side of the political spectrum “fail to understand the scientific method,” I am in the arrogant minority who would bet large sums of money that more than 95% of us don’t understand the “scientific method,” if what you mean by that idea is that someone could assess all research in a randomly-chosen field, such as climatology, and then independently – without recourse to their club hymnal – assess the critical inferences one should derive from that research and then determine optimal policy to address it. To those of us who have been humbled by vastly simpler problems within our own sub-disciplines – those of us who have spent more than a year on a single question trying to get it right -- social media gurus who want you to believe that they have a better command of climate change than climatologists, vaccine research than epidemiologists, stock markets and tax policy than economists, seem – frankly – naïve, to put it kindly.

Those of us who spent four to ten years in graduate study, then decades more doing careful work, cannot agree with the idea that a democratic mind – or a good person – should find everyone’s opinion on every subject equally valid. If this makes us arrogant, so be it.  People who know me well have said that I am compulsively open-minded –- I excessively solicit opinion from people in wide-ranging fields and professions.  I believe a good argument can and should stand on its own bottom, and anyone willing to advance it thoroughly and honestly deserves a hearing.  Besides, Gardner's geniuses were notably interdisciplinary and that seems right to me.  But this does not reduce to the odd complaint that everyone has a right to their own opinion.  A layman advancing a thorough argument is not the same as someone advancing a self-dealing opinion with nothing to support the case but a demand that everyone's opinion is equal.

Notably, many of those asserting the idea that all opinions are equal are not being honest. If they witness two athletes – one who has trained full-time for ten years and another part-time for two years – they are not reluctant to give the nod to the more committed athlete. If they had to hire one of two candidates – one with full time experience going back decades and the other with a smattering of experience over a few years – they hire the better, more experienced candidate. And when their child is sick, they do not take her to a witch doctor, but seek out an MD with a track record.

And their view of who deserves human dignity grossly fails the basic ethical demand that all humans be afforded dignity – they have 101 caveats and qualifications for who should get to go to school, be fed lunch, get a job, or even cross a border seeking asylum -- so it is not a universal dignity that moves them. In fact, it is only when they wish to violate the basic Elsterian principle of rationality – that our desires may not influence our beliefs – and they wish to assert that their desires about the unprovable are legitimate “beliefs,” that they screech that the experts are being arrogant for not saying that their fairy dust should be given equal weight to science’s atomic particles. All of a sudden, it seems, all voices matter.

But this is not merely a critique of the politically-correct Right (who shout about political correctness until it is actually about politics itself -- then, no one's feelings should be hurt and everyone's opinion should get a participation ribbon). I am also criticizing the Left who, while generally better educated, may be kidding themselves about what is wrong with the USA in 2019. We are not failing because people who support Trump cannot understand the scientific method. As I say above, very few do. Trump’s supporters are a mix of a some truly ignorant people, true, but those ranks include many angry sadists, many who live for their Schadenfreude, many who enjoy the 16 lies a day that Trump is being recorded as saying in public media – and enjoy the suffering those lies cause.

This is a proposal that we stop suggesting that people use “critical thinking” and the “scientific method” to assess major scientific and policy matters. Frankly, the unpopular position on this one seems right to me: go back to believing experts. You cannot replicate their research – not remotely. And no matter how many YouTube videos or inflammatory polemics you digest, you cannot improve on their research.

Believe them without discrimination? Of course not. Question their conflicts of interest – is there corporate money back there? Question their credentials. Question the ordinary biases of science – remember Tuskegee. Or even question their real politik – the FDA, even when it is functioning well, is 8 years behind – that’s what being politically cautious means. So, research done in the last 8 years is worth reviewing to determine if the finding has changed. But don’t kid yourself and think you will do the research yourself – unless that’s your field.

My arrogant idea for tonight is this: the problem with the Right is far deeper than their lack of a good education. They cannot, much less will not, ever invest in enough education for it to matter. But they are not dangerous because of that. They are dangerous because it serves very selfish and cruel ends for them to reject expertise out-of-hand. That is, they are not ignorant so much that they want you – indeed, everyone – to be ignorant. Virtually all fascists, all authoritarians in history have turned the angry Right into a weapon against experts because in order to take over and steal and destroy everything the experts who would warn us of their intentions must be removed from positions of influence.

As for the good and decent citizen – stop fretting climate science, vaccine science, the economics of general well-being, the sociology of racial justice, the Constitutionality of emoluments and the criminality of obstruction. Let those devoting their lives to those topics work them out. You cannot answer those questions– and shouldn’t have to answer them! Your job was always to believe the experts within reason and inject your own values and priorities into the political process to elect officials who would advance your priorities as well as possible.

It’s not about critical thinking or education. Trump supporters are not still behind him because they can’t do statistical inference, and more memes describing his 1001st crime against the law and/or humanity will not change them. Their values and yours are very far apart. Your job is to do what you can to advance your values – save the American Republic, if that’s your thing, or save the human species from extinction, if that’s it, or end the concentration camps before you go, or push back hard against the War on Women and the Ongoing and Never Ending War on People of Color. But it’s time we give a rest to the crazy social media idea that everybody should have an opinion about climate science, tax policy, the specific role of NATO in safeguarding the world from the advance of Putin’s oligarchs.

These are your options: (1) believe the consensus of experts in the field; (2) differ from the experts in very narrow and specific ways for extraordinarily good reason (e.g., you discover corruption at Tuskegee), or (3) reject expertise and be a grave danger to modernity. If you are not trying to throw us back into the Dark Ages, or support an Authoritarian Coup, this is not an option for you.