Know-it-alls?

Crooked Timber is a multi-author blog consisting of miscellaneous musings by an eclectic group of academics from several different countries. I have no idea how they know each other or why they created this blog, which doesn't seem to have any sort of unifying theme or concept. Anyway some of the posts are navel gazing, but some of them are interesting. 

Lisa Herzog is a German philosopher and social scientist. I haven't read any of her stuff so I can't tell you what kinds of deep thoughts she generally has, but in her latest post she considers a problem which has been troubling me, and a lot of people lately. To wit, why have so many people come to reject expertise and deny the conclusions of science? It's a lengthy piece which you might want to read, along with some of the comments. Anyway here's a pull:

 

How far can a government go in harming its own people before it loses support? And what does it mean if this form of harm happens via an attack on public knowledge institutions, from universities to meteorological services, in which expert knowledge is hosted? Even if you are not a friend of such institutions (and one could write many blogposts about what they could do better), isn’t there a basic sense in which they fulfill public functions in modern societies that should receive cross-partisan support? And shouldn’t there be some kind of recognition, on the part of lay people – which we all are, in the overwhelming majority of areas – that we need to trust the expertise of others for many public and private decisions? 

 

After some esoteric musings, she envisions what might happen when people discover that Trumpian lies have actually directly harmed them, e.g. 

what will happen if Trump voters interact with medical staff who tell them that they cannot offer them optimal treatment anymore because the government has shut down certain sources of information, or the development of new drugs has been stopped for lack of funding? . . . How many measle epidemics will it take before it might dawn upon people that these kinds of anti-expert policies harm them, and that the life and health of their families are at stake? . . .or it might happen if Trump ignores expert views on the relation between tariffs and inflation, or in many other ways.

She isn't confident that the scales will fall from very many eyes. Maybe confirmation bias, tribal loyalty, and information bubbles are too powerful. As I often say, I don't do prognostication, so I won't try to answer that. But the real anguish in her piece -- which is obviously written rather hastily and not carefully edited, it's really thinking out loud -- is that when experts try to set people straight, the people feel talked down to, and insulted. All the complaints from the right about "elites" that seem so weirdly misplaced, because the elites that are really harming them are the plutocrats who control the Republican party, are really about that feeling. 

If I tell people that I have a Ph.D. in social policy and I'm a health services researcher at an Ivy League university, so they should listen to me when I try to tell them what policies are good for them, that won't go over well. But the explanation for why I come to my conclusion won't fit on a bumper sticker, and in fact it might take me twelve pages just to provide the background information and concepts they would need to follow my argument. As Vaclav Smil writes in How the World Really Works,

 

You could meet real Renaissance men on Florence's Piazza Signoria in 1500-- but not for too long after that. . .  In 1872, a century after the appearance of the last volume of [Diderot's] Encylopedie . . . it is impossible to sum up our understanding even within narrowly circumscribed specialties: such tersm as "physics" or "biology" are fairly meaningless labels, and experts in particle physics would find it very hard to understand even the first page of a new research paper in viral immunology. . . Highly specialized branches of modern science have become so arcane that many people employed in them are forced to train until their early or mid-thirties to join the new priesthood.  

It's maybe not quite that bad -- you can get a decent qualitative and intuitive understanding of how scientists think in most areas by reading Scientific American, or books by interpreters of science such as, well, Vaclav Smil. But few people even do that, or would ever consider doing it. Whatever else you might say about RFK Jr., he doesn't tax your cerebral cortex. So I'm at something of a loss.