The likely return of expert authority

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Given the increasing likelihood of a Biden presidency, and his campaign promise to trust expert opinion, let's remember some of the experts who would be returning to power:

His classmates' attitude isn't an anomaly, and as the second link below notes, parts of it are official policy in most states:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell

https://reason.com/2017/03/18/sex-shrin ... the-state/

https://www.startribune.com/ketamine-st ... 486507021/

Why would anyone want those people back in power?

I think your concept of who experts are is rather seriously distorted.
Student discussions usually contain radical ideas. It's related to age and phase of life. Being expert comes with experience, later.

^ This.

Experts are those who have at least finished their educations. Relevant experts are those whose education and experience in their particular field of expertise is related to the subject under discussion.

Hence, a mere undergraduate student has neither the education nor the experience to claim expertise in anything, not even their major subject of study.

I'm looking forward to a situation where climate change is once again considered a physical phenomenon, and not a Chinese conspiracy to steal American jobs.

I'm looking forward to a situation where facts are again facts, and "alternative facts" are again fiction.

I'm looking forward to a situation where rigorous scientific training and extensively documented, replicated and peer-reviewed experience is again seen as a better indication of knowledge than the number of followers on Twitter.

I'm looking forward to a situation where truth is again spoken to power, and not the other way around.

I'm looking forward to the likely return of expert authority.

Well, I did provide several examples to show that we're not looking at 'a few bad apples' or 'kids being kids.' And I tried to make things easy for the TL;DR crowd by summarizing the most relevant part: "as the second link below notes, parts of it are official policy in most states"

From that link:


The people administering that system are certainly 'experts' in common parlance - court appointed specialists in psychiatry and psychology, judges, defense attorneys and admitting physicians. (They're also on par with specific expert groups that Biden held up as examples during the campaign, and who he could be expected to defer to as President.) And in this case those experts' behavior has been collectively appalling, which is relevant when we're debating the value of expert consensus.

How appalling? No honest person could apply that statute without realizing that it's wrong, since it shirks the basic duty of courts to seek truth. In the process it renders the rest of the proceeding arbitrary and the text of the laws meaningless.The fact that it's stood for so long is pretty good evidence of institutional rot in our judicial branch, and the silence of the American Medical Association suggests a similar amount of rot there also.

So no, I think Hussar17's example is damningly representative of American medicine. (I grew up in a medical family, by the way.)

... or how many YouTube videos you can link to, or how many "Non-Western" cultural traditions you can cite, or how many anecdotes of dubious origins you can relate, or how many apocryphal "horror stories" you can tell, or...

Fittingly, this is at the center of your post -- and should be at the center of all esoteric claims.

Yes.

For the record:
I have had experiences with an incompetent psychiatrist. I was swept to the over-mis-medication hellhole and I'm in bleeding pain thinking there are many more people like me out there.
I got out of it with help from a competent psychiatrist.

It's a fact: there are incompetent "specialists" in various fields and some of them are harming people. Their work needs constant weeding of peer-review and second opinions.
It's not perfect but the anti-science alternatives are much more dangerous.

Choose an idea that aligns with the current political agenda.

Construct a model based on the preconceived idea.

Find data that agrees with model.

Discard data that does not align with model.

The idea has now been scientifically proven.

Eliminate all sources of criticism as "science deniers".

Does anyone else find it quietly horrifying that it's even possible to make such a promise in what claims to be a first-world nation, and have it be actually meaningful in national politics compared to the people running the country?

I mean, not that there aren't many, many other horrifying things about the current administration, but even by itself, this is a giant red flag.

I've spotted a news line somewhere saying that Biden will join the Paris agreement next day if he wins.

Would it be constitutionally possible that early tho?

If that was how it worked, scientists would have spent the past 4 years loudly proclaiming that climate change is a fraud.

Experts aren't a monolith and technocrats vary in quality. There are some forms of technocratic thinking that I'm very much in favor of, and they're the types of people who try to look at complex systems in full fidelity, pretty much the opposite of what Thomas Sowell would call 'first stage thinkers' the way may politicians, demagogues, and some of the more siloed experts can be.

The late 20th century and especially early 21st has been marked by people with very deep knowledge in very narrow areas making decisions that take little more than their specific slice of knowledge into account. Some of this is the old fashion problems of power and prestige where people who've worked their arses off to get Phd's and the like don't want to share authority.

For as difficult as it is to actually be a polymath in the 21st century with as much as there is to know we need more polymaths regardless. One could maybe denigrate that as a 'jack of all trades master of none' approach but we seem to be in a place where we're socially and politically performing well below capacity and we're also leaving all sorts of gaps and niches open to bad economic actors that we'd have less of if we had more holists setting public policy.

My concern obviously with either party candidate - you have machine politics. Not the sort of thing that's likely to invite the kinds of experts you'd want.

I see no reason to think a campaign promise using a broad term like "expert" means that people who are into eugenics will be given positions of power.

The Conservative Party in Britain has flirted with proponents of eugenics a couple of times in recent years, and on both occasions been forced to sack the new appointee by a public outcry in which actual experts were prominent. Most recent case was an adviser to No 10 called Andrew Sabisky; before that it was Toby Young who was hounded out of a Departement of Education job by the combined forces of pretty much everyone in the country who cares about education. And the Tories have done some pretty vile stuff before now without the public forcing them to back down. I think we're safe from Nazi science for the time being.

It makes me cringe to hear that that happened to you, and I'm very sorry

I'm also impressed by your English, which is good enough that I didn't realize that you're in Poland until I accidentally noticed that in your byline just now.


Yes, that type of oversight is very important. But I think some of the examples I linked to imply organized malice rather than simple incompetence by individuals.

For example, the Ketemine study involved the staff of a large clinic forcing a drug with a significant mortality rate onto un-consenting patients, despite having an effective and safe alternative. The Minnesota Board of Medical Practice (medical guild tribunal) ignored it, and the county prosecutor (an influential Democrat) refused to prosecute, despite the fact that he's filed third-degree murder charges in cases that were more likely to have been accidental.

I think the backlash against 'experts' is similar to the backlash against police; most Americans support science and law enforcement, but we don't support criminal misconduct from any institution, especially when they lie and repeat the crime.