The death of expertise

I suspect this piece will find agreement from some of the very people it's targeting, but that's part of what makes it fun. Haha

Being a public policy/political science person, I used to think that it was annoying that everyone and anyone seems willing to discount genuine expertise in this field (and adjacent ones, like philosophy or economics) based on their personal readings of Hayek or Marx or Ayn Rand or whatever unguided journey of discovery they were going on. This is usually accompanied by a background assumption that the expert should be able to back everything they say up with "evidence" or an "argument" that would be accessible to a total layman with no training, even though the expert has presumably spent years or decades of their lives dedicated to studying up on a subject from multiple points of view.

This section really hits the nail on the head:

Critics might dismiss all this by saying that everyone has a right to participate in the public sphere. That’s true. But every discussion must take place within limits and above a certain baseline of competence. And competence is sorely lacking in the public arena. People with strong views on going to war in other countries can barely find their own nation on a map; people who want to punish Congress for this or that law can’t name their own member of the House.
None of this ignorance stops people from arguing as though they are research scientists. Tackle a complex policy issue with a layman today, and you will get snippy and sophistic demands to show ever increasing amounts of “proof” or “evidence” for your case, even though the ordinary interlocutor in such debates isn’t really equipped to decide what constitutes “evidence” or to know it when it’s presented. The use of evidence is a specialized form of knowledge that takes a long time to learn, which is why articles and books are subjected to “peer review” and not to “everyone review,” but don’t tell that to someone hectoring you about the how things really work in Moscow or Beijing or Washington.
This subverts any real hope of a conversation, because it is simply exhausting — at least speaking from my perspective as the policy expert in most of these discussions — to have to start from the very beginning of every argument and establish the merest baseline of knowledge, and then constantly to have to negotiate the rules of logical argument. (Most people I encounter, for example, have no idea what a non-sequitur is, or when they’re using one; nor do they understand the difference between generalizations and stereotypes.) Most people are already huffy and offended before ever encountering the substance of the issue at hand.

I used to think this was specific to poli-sci and philosophy just because everything has a political or philosophical dimension. And maybe it is worse in those fields, but then I notice anti-vaxxers, I notice all these dime store nutritionists and self-help people, and I realize it really is just everywhere. If even medical doctors can't command deference, I don't know what hope there is for anyone else?

The worst part is, people aren't always wrong to doubt experts. Many disciplines have deeply ingrained assumptions and biases that aren't congruent with the real world or discount the perspectives of subaltern groups. And often those experts will react with hostility or dismissal when you try to address these foundational gaps in their own understanding. So it's not even like you can have a clear "you should trust the experts uncritically" message here. Like, the very site this article is written in is noted for tons of motivated and inchoate reasoning in service of conservative political ends. It's garbage. Rather, I think the general message ought to be that most people should be much more humble about what they think they know and how well they know it.