Is it experts or "experts"?

Bad manners are ignorant in and of themselves, it being no better when the well-educated mock and deride than when the unwashed do.Experts often do not agree. Which expert should be believed?If one must acquire enough knowledge and skill to determine who is the sound authority, one faces a monumental task: one cannot become expert in all fields, yet still must consider matters of conflicting expert opinion; no one wishes to yield autonomy of thought, yet all must depend on others with greater knowledge and experience.Often the choice made of whether to believe an expert turns on begging the consequences; i.e., the Anti-Expert discriminates based on perceived best interest.(1)I would prefer to retain the expert-skeptic streak and ameliorate the ignorance rather than increase deference to authority. Who wants to live in an intellectual boot camp where experts pull rank and order our beliefs?Experts who want more respect from the ignorant may have to teach more and better ways to evaluate experts. Primary and secondary education is so busy with crowd control issues that passing along a penchant for skillful questioning of authority is anathema, and a general resentment of authority is cultivated.(1)
Omnivorous' Three Laws of Homoticsa. Homo sapiens act in what they perceive as their own best interests.b. Homo sapiens are not efficient perceivers of their own best interests.c. Me too.

Hi, Ben. I agree--I didn't intend to suggest that the skepticism of experts ameliorates ignorance; rather, in the face of both phenomena--popular skepticism of experts and widespread ignorance of how to evaluate expert opinion--I would prefer to see the ignorance ameliorated rather than the skepticism reduced.I generally agree with the rest of your post. Yes, and it is this valid impulse, I think, that leads people to bracket out expert opinion per se, and instead evaluate the various opinions based on "utility"--or impact--in light of their own interests. With the concept of utility, we approach the concept of cost, the equations of gains and losses: in public policy, the challenge is to find a way to negotiate both the Scylla and Charybdis of polarized opinion, and the shoals of divergent costs and benefits, while maintaining a civil polity.I've enjoyed your attempts to do this, here and elsewhere. It reminds me of Rogerian rhetoric, a method I encountered in an early expository writing course. In an attempt to remove discourse from an "arena" of reason, to move from the battlefield to the table, Rogerian rhetoric first requires each party to paraphrase the other's position to that other party's satisfaction, before any discussion of merit or evidence begins. This has the value of creating a common set of terms before misunderstandings occur. The process then moves to finding common ground, then differences, then searching for a synthesis of action/policy acceptable to both sides. I have used the technique in tense meetings that threaten to get out of hand; reducing the structure of confict implicit in classic debate can be quite productive.And yes, your post generally sounds like moral relativism to me, brother--which I prefer to the more common moral atavisms

I would go so far as to say more often than not experts are used to stifle disagreement. The most prominent public use of experts--in litigation and politics--is adversarial, and the popular perception is that anyone can find an expert-for-hire.If you have the bucks, the good professor has the facts...this pay-to-say is corrosive to trust and respect.

Hi, RAZD.Nice post, good overview: while I agree that... ...let me point out that I was referring to the "most prominent public" aspects of expert opinion--paid or partisan speech in adversarial contexts--in order to discuss its caustic effect on confidence in experts.Having worked in medical institutions for 20 years, I can tell you that people in general do no better at evaluating medical expertness than any other kind.Quite aside from fringe medicine and fraud (crystals, naturopathy, homeopathy, mircale fad diets, etc., etc.) that, sadly, distract millions from better care, almost no one bothers to check a physician's credentials or even to obtain the limited outcome data publicly available. Opinion shopping often continues until the patient hears what she wants to hear, rather than until a consensus, or a broader understanding of the issues, is reached.As a patient who has consulted multiple surgeons for multiple procedures over the years, I can report that, as my grandma said, when you go to the shoe store, they sell you shoes. On a related note, I can also report from long inside experience that while physicians generally order tests when they consider them necessary (for diagnosis or self-defense against malpractice claims), most labs get a rising number of normal scans and tests when business is slow... So I would say the negative impact of experts' self-interest on the credibility of expert opinion is pervasive in both public and private spheres.My subjective sense is that experts received much greater deference in the mid 20th century, and I believe that the marketing of expert opinion as an adversarial commodity, and the failure of the media in general to vet supposed experts, are responsible for much lost esteem.In Asia, I sometimes functioned as a "consulting expert" to American firms considering investment or wondering why their Asia investments had failed: the qualities required of an expert were often irrelevant to a knowledge or skill base--being from out of town, or being on the scene, or being without connection to anyone in the home office (and thus able to report what's happening on the ground without prejudice), or even being willing and able "to say what I (the executive who retains the expert) want to say but cannot."Our schools, our media, our experts: all need to do a better job in teaching the public how to evaluate expert opinion. There are many barriers: skepticism of expert independence, resentment of a privileged class, susceptibility to appeals to consequence...but the stakes are high.

Thanks, Ben. I felt we achieved considerable mutual understanding from that exchange, and I enjoyed it.