The death of expertise.

Travis of the Cosmos wrote:It happens here all the time dwags. It's anazing how many people claim to know everything about every single political issue on this board then they say they aren't just being told what to think by a party. It's crazy.

Now before you say "you old coot you have something to say all the time." Truth is though if you pay attention, you'll notice that I have little, maybe nothing, to say about foreign policy. There are things we discuss that I actually know quite a bit about. Foreign policy isn't one, so I stay quiet and read. Anyway. I dunno. I just had that thought the other day while I was reading this board and then I saw this thread so I thought I'd share.

GRR Spartan wrote:My sibling lives in NoCal. In the last few years they have seen schools shutdown due to whooping couch outbreaks. It hasn't been limited to schools with high immigrant populations.

A district adjacent to theirs was one and the major reason they closed was they checked their records and a significant number of the students who didn't have vaccinations were from middle and high income homes whose parent's became experts on the dangers of vaccinations they learned on the interwebs and TV talk shows.

The news that the doctor in England had cooked the books to get his findings later proved false? All drug company propoganda.

steveschneider wrote:I hope in 2017 people that think they know more than people with advanced science degrees realize they  don't.

Today, any assertion of expertise produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious “appeals to authority,” sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a “real” democracy.

But when citizens forgo their basic obligation to learn enough to actually govern themselves, and instead remain stubbornly imprisoned by their fragile egos and caged by their own sense of entitlement, experts will end up running things by default. That’s a terrible outcome for everyone.

Expertise is necessary, and it’s not going away. Unless we return it to a healthy role in public policy, we’re going to have stupider and less productive arguments every day.

Turtleneck wrote:At the start of the article, he touches on a growing problem. There is a rising anti-intellectualism in this country.

Today, any assertion of expertise produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious “appeals to authority,” sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a “real” democracy.

This rising anti-intellectualism comes in two forms. First, we increasingly reject the rational and objective pursuit of knowledge in favor of the emotional and subjective (when it reaffirms what we want to hear). Second, there is growing contempt for experts. We have gotten to a point where we reject experts because of the very credentials that qualify them to be experts. You have a Ph.D.? Well then you cannot be trusted. Meanwhile these people have likely passed a battery of exams to get where they are, and have designed and carried out any number of original research projects.

We do not let the man sitting in seat 10C fly the plane. We let the pilot fly the plane because they are the expert. We do not let the woman sitting in her car outside the hospital perform the emergency surgery. We let the surgeon perform the emergency surgery because they are the expert. We do not let Travis fix our transmission. We let a mechanic fix our transmission because they are the expert. It is actually quite simple to understand.

To some extent this is the expert's own fault for isolating themselves from the public and engaging in esoteric debates with their peers. He says as much with his comment, "To be sure, some of the blame rests with the increasing irrelevance of overly narrow research in the social sciences," and also "Universities, without doubt, have to own some of this mess. The idea of telling students that professors run the show and know better than they do strikes many students as something like uppity lip from the help, and so many profs don’t do it." Nonetheless, this anti-intellectualism is a problem and it is normalizing a lot of really bad habits. People will not, or are incapable of,vetting information on their own. In some ways this is rather ironic. Being a critical thinker means asking questions. It is is fine to challenge experts so we get the best answers. However, we often challenge without much knowledge about what we are challenging, why we are challenging, and especially how to challenge. This will obviously have consequences for our democracy, which he refers to at the end:

But when citizens forgo their basic obligation to learn enough to actually govern themselves, and instead remain stubbornly imprisoned by their fragile egos and caged by their own sense of entitlement, experts will end up running things by default. That’s a terrible outcome for everyone.

Expertise is necessary, and it’s not going away. Unless we return it to a healthy role in public policy, we’re going to have stupider and less productive arguments every day.

In the interest of transparency, what brought me to this thread is what an expert might have done. Trump appointee Monica Crowley, who has a Ph.D. from Columbia, might have heavily plagiarized her 2012 book. This gives further incentive not to trust experts, and she might have plagiarized some dreadful sources. At the same time, the Trump transition team, for the time being, is sticking with Crowley. If this is the case, we further normalize some very bad habits.

DWags wrote:She's an expert plagerist. But so was trumps wife.

LooseGoose wrote:

DWags wrote:She's an expert plagerist. But so was trumps wife.

Strangely it was ok for Biden.

He admitted plagiarizing multiple speeches and in law school yet he did ok as VP.

Sometimes it mystifies me what the deciding factor is.

DWags wrote:

LooseGoose wrote:

Strangely it was ok for Biden.

He admitted plagiarizing multiple speeches and in law school yet he did ok as VP.

Sometimes it mystifies me what the deciding factor is.

Why'd she drop out? Did her feelings get hurt she was caught, or is she afraid she wouldn't do a good job?

DWags wrote:

LooseGoose wrote:

Strangely it was ok for Biden.  

He admitted plagiarizing multiple speeches and in law school yet he did ok as VP.    

Sometimes it mystifies me what the deciding factor is.  

Why'd she drop out?  Did her feelings get hurt she was caught, or is she afraid she wouldn't do a good job?

Robert J Sakimano wrote:funny watching Trump supporters defend academic and intellectual fraud.

LooseGoose wrote:Says the man that supports a Vice President that admitted plagiarizing in law school. All hypocrites.


and BTW - point where i supported Crowley? You won't find it, you just plain lied again. but don't worry TN and OTPT will call me the biggest liar to cover for you.

Robert J Sakimano wrote:

LooseGoose wrote:Says the man that supports a Vice President that admitted plagiarizing in law school. All hypocrites.


and BTW - point where i supported Crowley? You won't find it, you just plain lied again. but don't worry TN and OTPT will call me the biggest liar to cover for you.

I'm sorry that my words upset you.

GRR Spartan wrote:Goose, You support a guy who screwed people for over 30 years in his business career.
He admitted to shreding documents the DOJ had requested when he plead no contest in a discrimination case.
He told a NJ governor there would be no junk bonds used if he got state financing he requested and then used junk bonds.

Here's the deal Goose, Joe Biden never got the nomination for President and your beloved conservatives put Winky Palin on the ticket as VP that many folks think helped the Obama/Biden ticket.

But we get it Goose.

Conservatives are always victims. You got nothing to worry about. Trump and Putin are paragons on honesty.

“What I think is part of the challenge here is that people’s hardening belief systems are going against the science,” Myers said Saturday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. And that’s true—one of the biggest reasons that it’s so hard for facts to change people’s minds is that people have an incentive to keep believing what they already believe, as I’ve written before, especially if it’s a belief that’s deeply tied to their identity. The mental gymnastics they do to achieve this are known in psychology as “motivated reasoning.” It’s something that’s extremely hard to get around. If people change their minds on these things, it happens slowly, and it often has to be something they want to change their mind about.

President Trump’s policy agenda is in trouble. After nearly seven months of intramural fighting and several dramatic reversals, the Republican effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act died in the Senate. By the end of last week, even the most stalwart opponents of Obamacare seemed ready to move on.

At the center of the Trump White House’s difficulties has been its own inexperience with the complex web of statutes, organizations and procedures that constitute contemporary American government. Trump’s aversion to the details of dealmaking means that even if congressional Republicans manage to pass a plan to repeal, replace, repair or revise Obamacare, it will be despite — not because of — help from the presidency.

Yet, as I argue in a forthcoming issue of The Forum, it would be a mistake to evaluate Trump’s effectiveness on the basis of legislative failures alone. Whereas other presidents have used policy overhaul — prepared by experts — to change politics, Trump is using the presidency to generate political conflict and to undermine the cadre of policy experts who make government work.