One of the talking points against the internet and social media is that it has led to the death of expertise.
The issue with this is that, when you move away from the hard sciences and engineering, which still leaves vast swathes of public policy, the experts aren’t much, if any, better than laypeople.
The majority of pundits got the Iraq war wrong. The majority of economists (the vast majority) did not see the housing/CDO bubble and did not expect the financial collapse.
The people that were the gatekeepers of the old media pick, suck. Almost all of them got wrong the two most important issues of 2000s.
So the idea that the internet and social media is worse seems questionable.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)
As for fake news, I will point out, again, that the New York Times liked about the Iraq war. Fake news.
With devastating consequences.
This isn’t to say that no filters or regulation would be good, but I don’t trust this government or these social media companies to decide who gets to talk.
I think anyone who does is foolish.
bruce wilder
Was the Iraq War a hard call? Morally and ethically? Or, in terms of, for lack of a better term, intelligence assessment?
Seriously, was there a case for thinking Saddam Hussein bore responsibility for 9/11? Was there a case for thinking Saddam Hussein was in possession of or “seeking” WMD? Was there a case for abandoning the process of inspections?
Was there a moral case for abandoning the principle prohibiting wars of aggression in the case of Iraq? Was there a case for not acknowledging Iraq’s capitulation to Bush’s ultimatum?
Expertise implies both the possibility of superior judgment and better information, and a general acceptance of the idea that it is to the general advantage of society to seek to cultivate superior judgment and better information, and to defer to superior judgment and better information in collective decision-making, that is, in public policy.
I would submit that the possibility of superior judgment and better information exists, but the political classes, the ruling class and their cadres of professional and technical helpers, do not see an advantage to themselves in deferring to it.
Any genuine sense of responsibility for the general welfare or the public good has to be seriously eroded before no one in power really cares about policy failures as monumental as the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq or the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007-8. Those kinds of failures can not be unintentional mistakes. There has to be conviction among the powers-that-be, indeed across whole classes of elite officials and opinion-makers that genuine expertise not only should not matter, but is actually disadvantageous to entertain.
I actually loathe the thesis that (almost) no one saw the GFC coming. I think it is true that most academic economists paid little or no attention and many derided those few who did. Not because genuine expertise was unavailable and no one coulda node. I was following the Calculated Risk blog from late 2005 onward and the reality of the housing bubble was daily news. Someone among the powers-that-be thought the Bankruptcy Bill was a good idea. Someone thought Ben Bernanke was the man for the job — he actually was the expert on how to handle what was coming (if your desiderata are to prevent New Deal reforms) — his expertise was wanted!
If you want society to be governed in ways that benefit the society in general, then you want expertise — genuine expertise in fields like foreign policy or economics. Sound judgment with a foundation in moral principles and good information.
That is not what is on offer from the gatekeepers of corporate Media for the most part. Or from the political establishment that chooses the politicians we can vote for.
Whether very many people even still have a taste for it ought to be concerning.
ttu
Point taken, sort of. It seems to me there is an important distinction to be made between reporting and analysis. Reporting is, well, reporting: conveying a report of, for example, an event. The organization of that information is a necessary element of reporting, so that while it is true that any number of people may have a hand in shaping the content of the report, that process does not itself convert a factual account into an analytic one. Your examples, on the other hand, seem to me, unless I misunderstand them, to be analytical failures. That suggests to me that they are a kind of epistemic failure in that the fault lies more with the methodology used to reach the conclusion (as a kind of aside, the knowing presentation of false information is a different question because doing this is not reporting but instead a bad faith violation of a set of normative expectations).
So I might say that you are pointing at a problem that is endemic to the presentation of expert opinion to the general public. For someone to reach a point where they can reach a large audience on the basis of one’s expertise, they almost always must have arrived at a position of influence within their area of expertise by operating more or less within the epistemic framework of that point in time. So an expert is certainly subject to a number of failures that might appear invisible. But none of that has anything to do with the accuracy of the facts, such as they may be. Additionally, while it is true that from time to time newspapers and the like make mistakes, such mistakes are inherent in the production of reportage in the midst of events and within a short time frame and unless the organization is incapable of substantive accuracy at the time an occasional error is unavoidable. When the immediacy element is removed the picture starts to look rather different. For example, AFIK the New Yorker’s fact checking department has never allowed a serious effort to pass through to publication. And, it should be observed that this factual accuracy may form the basis for an analysis but is itself no guarantee of analytical value. One more point: While it is true that an expert may well be captured by an ideology, a group or even their desire to validate their own work, it is an error, I think, to wholly discount the value of the path that led them to their particular hilltop. An actual expert usually must have demonstrated a certain proficiency in thinking, even if it was not of a mathematical sort, sufficient to proceed to where they obtain acceptance in their field. Does this guarantee accuracy? No. But it does at least make it more likely that this person can be assumed to at least be competent to construct at least a plausible argument. In other words, while they may operate with a bad model, they are unlikely to make the kind of basic reasoning mistakes that are often intentionally introduced into public discourse to befuddle the unwary. Just to be exceptionally tedious here, I am not talking about imagination, breadth or depth of perception, merely the baseline requirement that the person offering an expert opinion has demonstrated a certain basic competence in thinking (even an expert captured by, say, a toxic company must demonstrate a certain level of competence and plausibility for their conclusions to be considered). It simply does not follow from the premise that because some experts are wrong that all expert opinions are worth no more than an uninformed person’s opinion. (If you are making a narrow point about social media, then my narrow response would be that I don’t rely on social media for information precisely because social media monetizes content without regard to veracity. Any value is incidental rather than intentional. Convenience may be a common excuse but it is never a sufficient justification for a failure to engage with sources that at least attempt to provide something of actual utility to people rather than an aggregate number of heads to advertisers.)
450.org
Great point. I agree completely. This is why a business degree is worthless and a waste. As part of a higher education reform initiative that should accompany any free higher education legislation, we need to eliminate worthless degrees and frivolous, ludicrous even, avenues of study. When it’s all said and done, only a fraction of high school graduates should be required to have a college education.
Take this professor at NYU, for example. He sure sounds sophisticated, doesn’t he? And yet when you boil it down, his point, if there is one, is so simple and mundane, it’s not even worth mentioning or discussing.
I don’t want my tax dollars paying for this bullshit.
I agree, we should stop loving our products if we want to survive as a species.
Stop Loving Your Products!
Hugh
The paradigm nowadays and for around the last 40 years has been conclusion first, “evidence”/facts second. Cheney and the neocons wanted to invade Iraq because they thought that Iraq was a stabler place than the KSA where they could install US bases, exploit Iraqi oil, and project American power. They were contemptuous of anyone with any knowledge of Iraq or the Middle East. They created a casus belli out of cherrypicked and often facially false intelligence from biased parties. Even as they were trying to do an invasion on the cheap, they still lied about its costs. The kick ass and bypass invasion which followed was tactically brilliant and a strategic disaster. Stockpiles of weapons and explosives were carted off by future insurgents because there were no soldiers available to secure the weapons depots or really anything else. The Occupation was similarly botched by this attitude that “we don’t need to know anything, we create our own reality.” So at the one juncture when a political settlement could have been imposed on the sects, none was. The approach to rebuilding the Iraqi economy was similar. They felt all they needed to say was “Free markets” and walk away. The result was that the initial disaster of an unnecessary and illegal war was followed by many others lasting down to the present.
Re the GFC, neither Bernanke nor Greenspan before him thought anything needed to be done about the housing. Regulation was unneeded. The markets would self-correct. So when the housing bubble burst in August of 2007, Bernanke thought this was part of the correction and did nothing. Even after Bear Stearns went splat in March of the following year and the Fed intervened, Bernanke saw no systemic problem. Bear was an isolated event. And any future Bears could be handled as needed in an ad hoc way. This was one of the reasons why on the weekend of September 13-14, 2008, Bernanke and Paulson made provisions for the insurance giant AIG, and the 3 of the 4 remaining investment banks: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Merril Lynch, but critically not Lehman which blew up on Monday the 15th and took the whole financial system with it. Even in the face of all this, even as trillions and probably a couple tens of trillions of dollars were flowing through various Fed programs to bail out those who had run the financial system into the ground, Bernanke never accepted the need for any major regulatory reform.
I would add supply-side economics under all its various names into this conclusion first category. Every time it has been tried, it has failed –spectacularly, it has failed for 40 years, but it keeps getting resurrected because it is such a useful excuse to siphon more money off to the rich.
Bill H
Consider the difference between, “according to sources who demanded anonymity because they were not authorized to speak,” and “as evidenced by this reporter’s observations of troops moving south accompanied by…”
The difference is not a matter of “expertise.”
Andy Sprott
It’s not that trained expertise in the natural and physical sciences particularly is so much better than lay expertise, it’s just that it’s very obvious when trained expertise is absent and the return isn’t as rich for the pundit wanting to make a name for themselves (they tend to stay away or be in less visible fora). Trained expertise in the social and behavioural sciences is pound for pound better than lay expertise as it is in the other domains – it’s simply harder to falsify lay expertise in ways that are obvious to the lay audience.
The other major problem when it comes to public policy is that the crux issue isn’t expertise, in the sense of knowing enough to come up with a viable set of options, it’s execution. Without having been in the government sphere, it’s hard to understand how little real execution capacity government has. People think government is this big powerful, magic wand to enact their desired course of action but really it’s like a T-Rex – it looks big and powerful and loud and has pointy teeth, but it’s got these cute little arms that really aren’t that useful. If the policy challenge can be met by biting someone in half, brilliant but ninety-nine times out of a hundred that’s not the requirement.
Andy Sprott
One other dynamic, where social media really is making a negative difference, is the direct access to decision makers. Where previously the Minister’s attention would be focused on choosing among a set of five or six options generated by people with reasonable expertise on the issue (and more importantly, significant familiarity with government track record and capacity), now their attention is split in that they’re considering a wider range of options, including some that have come over the transom. Sometimes these are good, but not infrequently they’re pretty whack – but because noisy informational environments are dominated by those willing to shout the longest with the most consistent voice, the Minister keeps them in the mix. The staff (who are increasingly all about 12 and have a one crisis deep memory, if that) are all too much of a bunch of generalists to effectively spike the whack job options. Essentially, Ministers are increasingly choosing junk options based on junk perceptions driven by social media groundswell. The broader social id is a pretty stupid beast.
bruce wilder
Expertise as the privilege of the credentialed and tenured can be different from the genuine expertise of the skillful and knowledgeable.
The former becomes confused with the class interest of the highly educated (i.e. possessing educational and professional credentials) “liberal” and “progressive” centre-left. A lot of the pseudo-expertise served up by corporate Media along with praise for expertise generally exists to flatter this class that they are the best, superior, deserving and in no way to blame.
It becomes an excuse for a politics where conflict cannot be negotiated. The non-expert side of any argument is denigrated and devalued.
The controversy over the proliferation of mandatory vaccines of sometimes dubious cost-benefit optimization is an example. The proponents of vaccination are encouraged to frame the case in simplified terms that obscure the inevitable tradeoffs in choosing among alternative public health strategies for diseases of varying character. The opponents are deprived of expert assistance in expressing their concerns and made out to be irrational and stupid.
Brexit might be another example. Expertise in the details of trade agreements and the construction of efficient transfer of goods and services in international commerce becomes a cudgel in the argument against Brexit — apparently Brexit is impossible on any finite schedule and all “reasonable” compromise comes down to no Brexit at all. Most of the analysis of the popular political forces favoring Brexit are framed in cultural terms — racism, resentment, xenophobia — rather than in terms of economic grievance.
nihil obstet
We all have biases according to our self-interest, upbringing, beliefs, values, communities. The fiction about expertise is that greater knowledge has overcome these biases in the expert. In fact, expertise seems simply to provide facility in a technical language that hide the biases. And frequently, the training in the field narrows the thought process of the trainer, so that the expert is less likely to be persuaded by conflicting data and more likely to seek reasons to disregard such data.
DMC
I recall my consulting futurist father in law describing a commitee session in congress in the late ’60’s, regardimg the rise of the new “information economy” with the progress of computers and so on, where one noted expert after another gave testimoney about how great the democratization of knowledge(as they put it) was going to be. And then this one fellow(named Beers or possibly Beer) comes up and says “No, its going to be terrible. When EVERYONE has a microphone(in effect), they’ll all just babble at once and the noise will entirely drown out the actual signal. No one will know who’s opinion to trust because everyone will be shouting at the top of their lungs. Knowledge and expertise will become irrelavent, with the obvious results following shortly.”
And now, here we are.
Jack Parsons
The two examples you give are cases where one’s career is penalized for not saying what Big Money wants. Political news was, and economics still is, controlled by agents of the very rich.
Expertise is valued in situations where one’s career is penalized for actual failure.
Political news is no longer controlled by the (old) very rich, but by the new very rich who haven’t quite figured out what they want to do with it. The new very rich destroyed The Mighty Wurlitzer. And so, the old very rich can’t create a war against Iran.
Willy
Theoretically, the internet should be a great tool for all kinds of rational problem solving, for almost anybody.
But experts can get wrapped around the axle of their good-ideas-eventually-proven-bad when their livelihoods get involved. Human herding appeals to many. Many people buy on emotion and rationalize later. Most average folks confuse feelings with facts, giving problem-solving priority to quick and easy pleasant solutions, or unrealistic threats, when their best bet is always to just detach emotions and think things through. Increased stress makes people want to come to cognitive closure, to solve that problem right now. And so on.
The internet amplifies all that. And we get a culture where grifters trading in emotional nonsense are outcompeting real experts with cold hard facts.
Still, myself needing drill bits sharpened I resisted the emotional appeal of impulse buying the expensive magic drill bit sharpener that converts into a pocket fisherman. On the internet I found a boring old metalworking expert who taught me how to sharpen my bits with tools I already own. Now if I could just expand my newly found rational discipline and teach others, without having to get all Matthew Lesko.
Hugh
I learned today from the experts at Morning Joe that there does not seem to be any Left in this country. There is only a Far Left, and it apparently starts considerably to the right of Bernie Sanders. I believe it was Willy Geist who informed me that “most” Americans are happy with their health insurance. And the Mighty Joe himself warned Democrats to be very careful because when Americans “learn” more about Medicare for All they don’t like it. I’m sure he’s right. How could any rational American want a system which costs less, covers everyone, and produces better results?
Jack Parsons said above, “Expertise is valued in situations where one’s career is penalized for actual failure.”
As the Boeing 737-Max disaster illustrates, it all depends on how failure is defined and who gets blamed for it. The Boeing execs had no time or interest in the expertise of their engineers. They pushed them to cut corners, they shipped jobs to non-union states, and several hundred people died. I have not seen that much blowback on the corporate culture which created this mess.
S Brennan
Expertise, outside of the hard sciences is, overrated.
Then there’s the snake in the grass, economics, which pretends to be science. Economics is to science what astrology is to astronomy, on the other hand, perhaps I am being too kind
Ever hear the of the Nobel Prize in Economics? Yes?
There is no such thing as a Nobel Prize in Economics. Economists, in order to give themselves a gravitas which they did not deserve, in order to be perceived as having an expertise they do not possess, stole the name of Nobel and awarded themselves the first “Nobel Prize” in 1968 and the “gatekeepers” in the press went along with the scam.
The first “economist” was a theologian…the last economists will also be a theologian, as will all those in between.
S Brennan
And speaking of “Gatekeepers”…
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/06/media-and-public-disagree-on-tulsi-gabbards-debate-performance.html#comments
Willy
‘Greatest economic expert ever’, Milton Freidman, proclaimed in his infamous profit doctrine: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”
Genius, except for the part where he actually used “stays within the rules of the game”, “open and free competition” and “without deception or fraud” in the same sentence. While talking about corporatists. And now we have a situation where the “rules of the game” are owned by “deception and fraud” who want less “free and open competition” to happen.
I wonder what could cause such an oversight. Something formative? Should undersized bespectacled little scholastic Jewish boys be forced to walk home from school through the rough hood every day, before assuming that the bullies just need better toys?
Temporarily Sane
The problem with social media is that it is almost by design a toxic environment. The negative (bullying, anxiety, outrage etc.) is rewarded and reinforced because that is what keeps users “engaged” and hooked into Facebook and co.’s data mining operation. The detrimental effects of social media use, especially on young people, is well documented. An already aggressive society is now more aggressive…and much less able to think critically.
As for “fake news”…it amuses me that some people are shocked to discover the media traffics in propaganda and represents the views and opinions of the ruling class. This is hardly a new phenomenon.
The internet is a poor surrogate for face to face interaction and living and acting in the physical world. It fools us into thinking we’re “doing something” when really we are alone behind our digital devices, manipulating electrons on a screen. Being informed is important, absolutely, but if all you do is talk and theorize, and maybe vote every few years, the potential for meaningful change is extremely limited.
Stirling S Newberry
The problem is, partially, that we have more extreme right-wing billionaires, more extreme followers, and the Republican Party resembles a far-right party.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/opinion/sunday/republican-platform-far-right.html
Hugh
The far right wing nature of the Republican party undercuts the whole bipartisan shtick of Democratic candidates like Joe Biden. Either they are deluded, running a con, or conservative themselves.
450.org
Bennet, Harris & Swalwell, collectively, knocked Biden’s obnoxious gleaming white horse teeth out in this latest circus of a debate. Bennet and Harris especially.
Biden’s campaign slogan should be….
Separate But Equal Again
….considering his bipartisan coddling of, and cooperation with, racist politicians throughout his dubious political career.
What’s ironic is that their evisceration of Biden last night is an evisceration of Obama. Afterall, Obama chose Biden as his running mate. What does that say about Obama’s judgment? About Obama’s character? Of course, all of us here know about Obama’s less than stellar judgment and character without the contradictory excoriation of Biden by Bennet, Harris and Swalwell, but the mainstream has not acknowledged, and will never acknowledge, Obama’s duplicity. If you tear down Biden, down goes Obama too in retrospect.
Bernie looked terrible. Yes, if not for Bernie, none of what was being discussed or proposed last night by all the candidates would have been discussed or proposed, but he’s piss poor at conveying it. He’s a terrible orator and his affect is off-putting. He’s a grumpy, constipated geriatric and his basic disposition is uninspiring. I know that’s shallow, but Americans are shallow if nothing else. They’re influenced by optics. This is in large part why Obama was so wildly popular.
450.org
Colbert is too shallow & vacuous to understand that Bennet’s teeth-smashing criticism of Biden’s legislative braggadocio was the most poignant of the evening precisely because it wasn’t meant to play any heart-tugging cards or score any cheap political points. It was the cold hard truth of the matter and setting the record straight. For that matter, Bennet’s scathing critique passed everyone by but it’s the heart of the matter with not only Biden but the Democratic establishment more generally.
This article explains it nicely.
A Quiet Joe Biden Debate Moment That Deserved More Attention
S Brennan
Folks, Biden was doing exactly what was supposed to…Making Kamala Harris [& by association, the DNC] look great again. He did a great job.
The fact that nobody here seems to have picked up on the ploy[?]..shows, it worked. MDGA hat anyone?
Mel
“Making Kamala Harris look great again.”
I’d wondered about that. Could the DNC have become sensitive to suspicions that they’re into picking the Winner? It would make sense to pick the Winner and the Front-Runner, and swap out the Front-Runner at the right part of the show.
450.org
S Brennan, if that’s the case, I’m fairly certain Biden is not in on it. He’s not that great of an actor.
It’s possible the malevolent cynics who comprise the DNC would conceive of a plot/strategy to use Biden as a foil in this regard, but if so, Biden is an unwitting dupe. Either way, the effect is the same and Biden’s all too happy to play the dupe even if he’s not aware he’s playing the dupe.
Let me ask you, S Brennan. If Bernie Sanders was miraculously (equivalent to parting the Red Sea) the Democratic nominee squaring off with Trump, would you vote for him or for Trump? Which of the Democratic candidates aside from Sanders and Gabbard would you vote for versus Trump? If it’s Biden or Harris who gets the nomination, will you vote Trump again or not vote at all?
450.org
I know Harris is a corporate Dem and she’ll say and do whatever she must to win the nomination and then renege on all of it if she won the presidential election, but she would positively pummel Trump come debate time. Would she beat him come election day? Probably not, but she’d knock the shit out of him in the debates.
S Brennan
Mel, how can anyone doubt that the DNC’s show was not orchestrated? Biden comes out of nowhere to grab the “polls” and obscure Harris who was getting too much early scrutiny.
BTW, the Joe & Kamala kabuki show did obscure news story that Tulsi Gabbard was stealing the polls with an allotted speaking time 1/2 that of Elizabeth Warren…you gotta just love that DNC chicanery.
With Biden as a shiny distraction, much of the web has been scrubbed of Harris sleeping her way into power with Willie [hey…just like Hillary] and her horrible record as prosecutor / Attorney General / Senator. Google searches now show Harris as “Joan of Arc”. And so it goes…
450.org
Did you note how Harris said she knows Biden isn’t a racist? Really, Kamala? You know he’s not? By virtue of his bipartisan cooperation with & coddling of the racists regarding desegregated busing, he enabled the furtherance of systemic racism which affected a substantial number of blacks for many more decades than was necessary. That makes him a racist every bit as much as Trump is a racist.
And you know what, Kamala, you’re every bit the racist Uncle Joe & Don the Con are by virtue of your illustrious track record as a prosecutor and attorney general. But we’re not allowed to say that because of the color of your skin, are we? Fuck it, I’m saying it any way because it’s THE TRUTH. You climbed on the backs of oppressed blacks, as all Dems do, to further your career at their expense and you’ll do the same to all Americans who aren’t the 1% once you’re in office if you were to win the presidential election in 2020.
KAMALA HARRIS HAS BEEN TOUGH ON BLACK PEOPLE, NOT CRIME
S Brennan
“S Brennan; If Bernie Sanders was miraculously (equivalent to parting the Red Sea) the Democratic nominee.. would you vote for him or for Trump?” —– 450.org
Before answering the question, let me restate my top 5 priotities 1] No more neocolonial wars; 2] No more neocolonial wars; 3] No more neocolonial wars; 4] No more neocolonial wars; 5] No more neocolonial wars.
~$4,000,000,000,000.00 since 2003 has been spent on these neocolonial wars…that is, what we know of…and that’s not including DoD. All other issues can not be addressed as long as this type of bleeding is not staunched..absolutely nothing, anybody who says otherwise is full of poop. Green New Deal ? C’mon…not when you shovel money at the neocolonialism project.
That said; If the DNC/[hillarites] anoint Kmala Harris, I will vote strongly Trump, contrarily, if the Red sea parts & Tulsi is nominated, she will have my vote and strongest support. If Bernie “folds like a cheap suit” Sanders is nominated I will probably* vote for Bernie…and be greatly disappointed as Bernie’s foreign-policy and personal weakness will probably result in more neocolonial wars.
I also think Bernie’s personal weakness is not a characteristic of someone that can return the Democratic party to the vibrancy of FDRism. BTW, Bernie looked weak against Hillary’s cut-out, Kamala Harris and that combined with his betrayal of his base in 2016, I see Bernie failing on his own this time. A lot of people who supported Bernie in 2016 will have trust issue with him in 2020.
Now, let me answer a question you didn’t ask.
Q: What would have you done had Bernie shown some guts and accepted the Green Party Nomination, [which was his for the asking]?
A: I would have strongly voted for Sanders. We may still of had Trump as Prez, but, we would have a new party and the evil the DLC/DNC would have been destroyed.
*I may sit it out, if Bernie starts rattling swords.
Mel
“Mel, how can anyone doubt that the DNC’s show was not orchestrated?”
No doubt, but now the orchestration is better. It used to be end-to-end Clinton. Now they’re making it less obvious, less blatant.
S Brennan
I agree Mel,
It is much better orchestration but…
Kamala is Hillary’s cut-out so, it’s still Hillary in the background.
450.org
S Brennan, thank you for your forthright response. I agree with it for the most part. So long as the military takes 60 cents of every FIT dollar collected or more, none of the other idealistic pie-in-the-sky policies can or will fly. The burgeoning defense budget sucks all of the life-giving oxygen out of the air.
I’m more cynical than you, though. The military industrial complex would never allow a Tulsi Gabbard or anyone to diminish it in any way. The neocolonial wars are the justification for the military’s burgeoning, bloated budget and truth be told, the military is very savvy to climate change and is poised to cash in on it from a budgetary perspective. The military has consistently proselytized about climate change and its destabilizing effects and the need for a strong and stronger military in the face of those climate change induced threats.
I don’t see how it’s possible to wrest the apparatus from the powers that be without massive bloodshed. I’m not advocating for massive bloodshed, I’m just underscoring that the powers that be will pull out all stops to remain in control and I believe that includes, as a last resort and Samson Option, nuking parts of America with tactical nukes if that’s what’s required after all else has failed.
S Brennan
450.org;
The ~$4,000,000,000,000.00 is just the off-budget* expenditures for wars…NOT DoD, no need to cut off the gravy train to MOST of the DoD contractors, just stop the effing neocolonial wars!
I can live with a bloated DoD, so long as we have no industrial policy [neoliberalism], it is defacto, the only thing supporting indigenous manufacturing.
*Visible-budget as opposed to the dark-budget.
A1
Ian – banning democratic primary chatter would help keep threads on topic. As someone working in the engineering profession it interests me how social scientists look at the hard sciences as some sort of paragons of virtue when we live in a world of no criticising fellow professionals. Worst amongst architects and doctors but equally in all professions hard science or not. The big problem with this is the best person to criticise an architects (substitute engineer or doctor or..) work is another architect as they have the background and training. Since architects refuse to do this you end up with non expert criticism as that is all you are going to get.
Bruce Wilders point about Brexit is bang on, especially from certain pundits who can’t believe things can work without a central authority managing – See Naked Capitalism. Great site but on Brexit firmly out to lunch.
Another problem with experts vs non experts is often the data is not available but to experts. We had an example in our city of a half way house going into an upscale neighbourhood. It was a sociology professor who led the fight against the facility and he had all kinds of insider data that is not available to the public without lots of effort. It is easier to call people names and argue on emotion than on facts. In this case the data made the prison system look awful regardless of your position on the half way house, and it was interesting to see a bunch of data our politicians do not want to talk about in the public domain.
Jeff Martin
I would endorse – most especially – Bruce Wilder’s comments; my fear, though, is that the problem is deeper, and essentially unsolvable, except contingently and almost accidentally. This is an age that valorizes meritocracy (which is an incoherent concept, but leave that aside), which entails the proliferation of sorting and credentialing mechanisms; the credentials are supposed to function as warrants of expertise, which is either equated with, or regarded as a proxy for, that sort of deeper knowledge – wisdom – that involves the application of a body of knowledge to circumstances more complex, more varied, and perhaps not envisioned by, the curricula that lead up to the credentials.
There is a possibility for slippage at each stage of this process, but the critical one, I think, is the one that underlies the entire process, and appears most acutely in the last stage, when the ‘experts’ are supposed to be applying their knowledge to the real world. The entire process supposes that the sorting and credentialing mechanisms, from testing to the granting of degrees, does in fact locate individuals possessing ‘merit’ (a fundamentally religious and mystical concept, fwiw), which enables those individuals to negotiate the transition from knowledge to judgment/wisdom. Eg., the economists pass through their PhD programmes, master a whole litany of complicated maths which, for all their complexity, radically simplify the functions of actually-existing economies, and in virtue of this, supposedly have the requisite faculties of judgment to formulate policies for those economies. Except, in the main, they don’t have those faculties of judgment/wisdom. They may fail to negotiate that transition for any number of reasons, from the inherent poverty of the assumptions embedded in their “science” to other biases or material interests.
An amusing example of this came a few years ago, when Brad DeLong, a neoliberal economist who served in some capacity in the Clinton administration, wrote a blog post laying out the rationale behind the free trade policies promoted in the 90s: aggregate-welfare maximization, compensatory policies for the ‘losers’, win-win. But when you read through the list of all of the policies that would have to be implemented in order to – possibly – secure this win-win scenario, the folly of this approach becomes obvious: a multitude of policy shifts would have to occur at all levels of governance, more or less at the same time, with the implementations being properly sequenced, in the teeth of opposition at every juncture, or else the whole allegedly welfare-maximizing scheme would come to nothing. Which it did. And that’s not even addressing the fundamental structural problem, which is that the whole rationale in practice for free trade/globalization was precisely to gain leverage over labor in the developed world so as to boost the profit share, meaning that, in order to secure those economic palliatives supposedly making the scheme win-win, you’d have to convince Capital to surrender the benefits for which it undertook the process in the first place. It was never going to happen. Even if we assume good faith on the part of left-neoliberals like DeLong, they never made that transition from technical knowledge to judgment, expertise to wisdom. And the same observation applies to health care policy, and more or less everything else.
There isn’t a reliable means of finding and cultivating people who can do this. This is the problem – in the abstract – of the relationship of philosophy to politics. You want people making decisions who have appropriate faculties of wisdom and judgment. In order to possess them, in general, they must have certain levels and types of expertise. But ultimately, expertise is neither necessary nor sufficient for wisdom and judgment; they are only correlated, and not even as tightly as we imagine. On top of that, the dominant ideologies in political economy and culture militate against wisdom and judgment, by multiplying the derailments that prevent people from moving from knowledge to wisdom/judgment.
Colloquially speaking, the people who brought us the Iraq War and the Forever War, the crisis of 2008, and the American health care system should not be trusted. These catastrophes are proof that expertise is not wisdom, that it is, more often than not, a dance of the seven veils obscuring some combination of material self-interest and ideological delusion. The crisis of post-truth politics is precisely the crisis of a foolish expertise that has failed.
Hugh
The expertise didn’t fail. It did exactly what it was meant to do. It gave cover for our rich and elites to loot and betray us.
Jeff Martin
Hugh, I don’t deny that the expertise was intended as cover for betrayal and looting. I’m just making a tl;dr case that even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that the experts acted in food faith, even if we steel-man the case for their claims, those claims still fail. A want of technical expertise hasn’t been the problem.
Willy
It can be argued that elitism can become dangerously pathological. Power can be seen as a sort of addictive substance which if left unchecked (to dependency, like alcohol) will rationalize any means. In our current situation ‘the enablers’ would be everything from the conservative evangelical mob to the so-called liberal media.