The Death Of Expertise

> You notice it's rarely the physics professors, or the (good) programming teachers, or the medical profs going, 'Our students don't respect our expertise any more'?

Really? I notice a lot of the same with the anti-vaccination crowd, and the anti-GMO crowd and the like. Obscurantism knows no boundaries.

I agree that Schneier is clearly an expert; it's the way you've reached that conclusion which I disagree with, as it could easily lead you to the wrong answer in any case where celebrity and actual expertise are not so happily aligned.

> Based on a quick google search, I concluded the author of this blog post appears to only write short, shallow blog posts. [...] Okay, why is there no quick link to a summary of his qualifications in direct support of the article's central premise?

Well, there was this at the bottom of the article: "Tom Nichols is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct at the Harvard Extension School." Anybody interested in evaluating or expanding upon these credentials could do so with (not to be trite) a quick Google search.

> Either way, my argument stands: On the internet, if you don't have name recognition and want to be taken seriously you have to demonstrate your expertise, because any layperson can quote a wiki article. It takes more than simply saying "I am an expert".

Your mistake is to look for demonstrations of expertise in the form of Google rank and other manifestations of popularity. That's not what actual demonstration of expertise looks like. Laypeople like us (relative to the field of public policy) have two options for evaluating domain expertise: (1) expend the significant effort required to become actual experts in those fields ourselves, or (2) accept the collective opinion of the larger body of experts in that field. The latter generally takes the form of academic credentials, professional awards, CVs, and the like – and as undemocratic as it may feel to yield to the judgment of a bunch of ivory tower elites, as laypeople it's all we have to go by if we value truth.

PageRank is a popularity contest. It answers neither (1) nor (2) above.

The blame resides on the media and its partnership with an undiscerning public. Time after time, the same experts are trotted out, no matter how awful their track record. This is at its worst when it comes to politics, unsurprisingly.

As a prime example, remember all the experts who got Iraq wrong? They were wrong about everything: WMD, cost, duration, effects, etc. Fast forward to the brink of the next war—instead of hearing from the people who were right, we're once again bombarded with the opinions of the wrong. Cheney and Rumsfeld were both on tv constantly spouting their expertise on Libya, Syria etc.

This happens in just about every field, time after time. It's no wonder people don't care what the so-called experts think.

That brings up one common conflation that I see a lot: equation of Wikipedia and "popular wisdom". People assume that because "anyone can edit" Wikipedia, it must be some kind of average of everyone's views, the "wisdom of crowds". But Wikipedia is really not a reflection of the average opinion. A huge percentage of Americans might believe in creationism or think that vaccines cause autism, but Wikipedia articles, despite a plurality of en.wikipedia being written by Americans, pretty solidly side with the expert consensus on those points. That might be due to demographics, due to the requirement for "reliable sources", or due to who knows what else, but the results are pretty different.

That doesn't mean Wikipedia is always good, and the very fact that its viewpoint is often unrepresentative of the views of the population at large might sometimes be bad (though other times it's good). But I think whether Wikipedia is good or bad, and whether the opinions of randomly selected individuals who think they know better than experts are good or bad, are pretty different questions that should be investigated separately, since Wikipedia is not saying the same things that a randomly chosen person at your local bar is saying, on almost any subject where there's a difference of opinion.

I can see why they get connected, because both things are bypassing gatekeepers in a way. But Wikipedia is doing it in a more complicated way, particularly because while the form of the encyclopedia bypasses gatekeepers (free, no bylines, no credentials needed to participate), the content of the encyclopedia puts a heavy value on citing sources, along with an ethos of trying to make sure the sources aren't kooks, which tends to attribute quite a bit of weight to experts' views on things.

>I agree that Schneier is clearly an expert; it's the way you've reached that conclusion which I disagree with, as it could easily lead you to the wrong answer in any case where celebrity and actual expertise are not so happily aligned.

I fail to see how; it's exceedingly rare to find true experts who haven't got publications of one sort or another to their name.

>Well, there was this at the bottom of the article: "Tom Nichols is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct at the Harvard Extension School." Anybody interested in evaluating or expanding upon these credentials could do so with (not to be trite) a quick Google search.

Well again, maybe he is an expert and merely a lousy writer. But none of this contradicts my point that his article's central premise (being an expert) needs to be clearly supported. That's like first-year undergraduate essay writing 101.

>Your mistake is to look for demonstrations of expertise in the form of Google rank and other manifestations of popularity. That's not what actual demonstration of expertise looks like.

Your mistake is interpreting what I wrote as conflating popularity with expertise. For the third time: I didn't choose Schneier as an example because he was popular. I stated outright my google search was cursory. You're missing the point.