Expertise Keeps Dying

Note: I drafted this piece prior to the attempted assassination of former President Trump. It feels a bit trivial to riff on the lingering effects of the Presidential debate as we all digest last weekend’s horrific and sad event. But I think the ideas presented below are still relevant. 

Expertise Keeps Dying

One of the trickiest moves in teaching is guiding students into areas of new knowledge that requires you to tell them what they previously learned was incomplete. Educators do this over and over again. Learning how to spell in English is a constant introduction of new rules and exceptions to those rules. We learn gravity only to be told later about quantum phenomena. Math has many of its own tricks like imaginary numbers and other mind-benders. Economics gets funky as soon as we acknowledge irrationality. The list goes on and generally the reasons for doing it this way are reasonable.

But navigating these choppy waters is risky. Indeed, we need to learn our fundamentals before learning advanced concepts and nuance. My daughter wants to improve her three-point shooting and gets frustrated when I suggest getting really good at much shorter shots first. People learning new things don’t like it when they think you think they aren’t capable of learning the full thing. 

This is condescension, and is there anything more offensive than condescension?

Condescension seems at the heart of our current political moment and it has grave consequences for education, science and expertise. 

When President Biden took the debate stage on June 27 it wasn’t just the clarity of his decline that washed over us, it confirmed the lie we’ve been told by the administration and its allies for over two years — a lie we all know defies our intuition and experience. President Biden is simply too old to be president. Is there an 81-year old person in your life who you think has the cognitive capacity and stamina to be president? I’ve never met one and I doubt you have either.

Yet we were told this Joe Biden is the best version of Joe Biden. The problem with this sort of condescension is it is not only an obvious lie, it’s a lie wrapped in the insinuation that you lack the capacity to understand the world. That you shouldn’t believe your lying eyes. That “we” know better than “you” do. Trust us; we are the experts. And, given the framing of this election on both sides as the end of democracy if the other guy wins, Democrats allowed themselves to be taken for a ride.

But in an instant that Thursday evening, the utter bankruptcy of it all came crashing down. Thirty minutes in, they told us he had a cold.

This same brand of condescension permeates many of our most important institutions. Higher education and prestige media now sit at the Left Pole. And that Pole has a strong gravitational pull. University faculty are enamored with our own ideas. We’ve made them our life’s work afterall. And when there is little to no viewpoint diversity on campus, it’s easy to begin to believe our ideas are the best ideas. This is the opposite of what a university should be, but it’s where we’ve been moving, especially at more elite places.

And where do most prestige media outlets and Democratic political operations source their talent? Those same places.

Journalists in the prestige media are relatively smart and convinced of it. They rarely spend much time around people who see the world differently. This cycle perpetuates itself and despite attempts at rigor, opportunities to stress test ideas decline. Add in a dose of algorithm and you get the filter bubble we all live with, along with the many other politically charged sorting mechanisms at play.

But back to the lie. It’s one thing to be lied to about inauguration crowd size or the path of a hurricane. It’s silly and easily refutable. It can be dismissed as a power play or even stagecraft. The lies former President Trump tells are outrageous, but they are a kind of entertainment, wrapped in grandiosity, much like professional wrestling. At the end of the day, they are not condescending.

The lie from the Biden campaign is worse because it reveals one of two things:

1. That they think we are so stupid we’ll believe it, or

2. That they are so stupid, they believe it.

And this is bad for anyone in the expertise business — universities, schools, politics, journalism — because we are part of this apparatus. Where did the lie about Biden’s age come from? From the experts, the highly educated folks who’ve been marinating in communities with declining self-skepticism and rising self-righteousness for decades. These are the same people who told you that masks worked, that the economy has never been stronger, that inflation isn’t real, that there’s no problem at the border, and that the only reason people would vote for Trump is racism. The point is not that they were wrong, it’s that they burned their credibility by arguing from ideology rather than evidence. 

Being lied to doesn’t feel good. We get angry and lose trust. Expertise is a social contract — it has no value unless people believe it. Educators are supposed to be empiricists. We are supposed to seek truth regardless of where it takes us and bring our students and the public along for the adventure. 

It’s one thing for a political party to detach itself from empiricism, to leave the so-called reality-based community. But it’s a completely different thing for our meaning-making institutions to do the same. If we want our students to trust us, and the public to maintain belief in higher education, we can’t start the conversation with something roughly equivalent to, “You’re stupid, but we can fix you.”

Educators and scientists need the credibility, goodwill and runway required to explain to us why sometimes what we are experiencing isn’t quite real — that the world isn’t flat, that climate and weather are not the same thing, that each of us likely holds biases we aren’t aware of, that we make decisions with predictable flaws, that some inflation is good, that many things we think of as fixed attributes are actually social constructs, but that age is not one of them.

The Biden lie threatens all of this. There are times we should believe our “lying eyes” and there are times we should not. 

And we need credible experts to help us distinguish between the two.