The Death Of Expertise

> Second-guessing their doctors and refusing to vaccinate their kids after reading stuff written by people who know exactly zip about medicine.

This claim was originally by an expert doctor.

> Which is why articles and books are subjected to “peer review” and not to “everyone review,”

Peer review struggles to correct inaccuracies and by failing to share the underlying data behind the assertions made, and especially in Tom Nichols' area of expertise (public policy) the data is the only way of invalidating claims (as opposed to abstract mathematical concepts, like machine learning). Further more, most peer review journals are behind paywalls of some kind.

Contrast this to the accuracy of Wikipedia (where, yes peers review the knowledge, but so can the general public) or the increasing support behind open peer review (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_peer_review) and the open research movement in general (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_research) it is at least questionable to argue that closed peer review implies a standard of truth.

> but don’t tell that to someone hectoring you about the how things really work in Moscow or Beijing or Washington.

It is funny he brings this up because Beijing is rife with academic dishonesty to the point where if the exact steps / data to reproduce aren't explicitly mentioned in the paper, I don't even read it.

> [A large, large amount of opinionated elitism ending with a call for the return of the days of gatekeepers]

Gatekeepers impede scientific inquiry. It wasn't until 1957 that we seriously started examining human sexual response. This is 100% due to gatekeepers. By advancing the case for open data, open methods, and open journals we may suffer more fools' opinion's on global warming, but it is far more worth it.

The reason I suspect that this author is especially angry is that public policy is politics in declarative form. "We will use one school of 500 kids vs five schools of 100 kids" has far reaching consequences that spill into the political sphere. The reason public policy is hard to take a seriously as a scientific endeavour is that it isn't often provable, although with open data would certainly improve it.

And it is exactly the same argument that was used against extending the franchise to non property owning men , women .... and so on.

Could you please post a citation for this? I do not know if you are right or wrong, and it is not something I have considered before, but I would appreciate the opportunity to learn what arguments were made at the time.

I think what the author misses is the large institutional structure that restricts the supply of experts and (as a result) enhances their prestige. These days, with the growing availability of technical information, existing systems of licensure, credentialing, and professionalization are breeding resentment on both sides of the lectern.

The author's focus in the article is on the layman's resentment for the expert. While most people would agree that experts are better qualified to talk about something than Joe Blogger, I think the urge to disagree with the expert is engendered by the larger power structure of expertise that has grown up over the past 100 years.

To take a trivial example, I wear contact lenses. While I agree that an optometrist knows a lot more about vision correction than I do, I resent the fact that I have to pay a lot of money to sit in a chair in a dark room and wait for The Expert to deliver his Opinion about whether I need the -4.5's or -5's.

The author of the article feels like he is the victim of resentment at the hands of his students (references to "intellectual valet" and so forth). I don't think students are necessarily in the wrong -- most are probably in college to get a job, and they're right to resent the stranglehold that universities have on social prestige and career respectability. They end up taking it out on the professors, because, well, they're stuck in class listening to The Expert for hours a day because of this or that degree requirement.

The experts then start to resent the laymen for failing to pay what they feel is a proper amount of respect for the superior state of their knowledge. They conclude that the solution is to come up with ways to enhance their prestige even more, for example by writing articles like this one that talks about how great experts are. I'm afraid this will only poison relations between laymen and experts even more.

What I love about computer programming is that basically all you need to be an expert on something is time, persistence, and an Internet connection. Contrary to the author's claims, the alternative to institutionalized expertise is not that "Everyone is an expert". It's that "You don't have to go to a prestigious university to become an expert". Sure, there are a lot of charlatans running around in the programming world, but the free exchange of knowledge and the absence of licensure has led to both a flowering of human creativity as well as (outside of San Francisco) non-resentful relationships between experts and laypeople.

Also, for anyone interested, one of my favourite talks is about a study of political forecasters and their accurancy over the years, seen from this perspective: (the video is paywalled, but the audio is free):

http://longnow.org/seminars/02007/jan/26/why-foxes-are-bette...