13 ms·

Experts vs elites

169 points by asimjalis 5y ago

moksly 5y ago
> elites are selected primarily for their prestige and status, which has many contributions, including money, looks, fame, charm, wit, positions of power, etc. I’d argue that it’s only money. Prestige, looks, charm, wit and even positions of power come and go and rich people have always surrounded themselves with those the same way they have always surrounded themselves with experts. At its core, I don’t think human society has really changed that much since the dawn of organised civilisation. Sure we’ve tried different some very systems over the thousands of years, but if you zoom out to the helicopter perspective, the biggest “influencers” have always been the oligarchs and the sole requirement for joining their ranks is having lots and lots of money. At least I can’t think of a period of human history, or a political system, where the richest families within it, didn’t have much more power than the ordinary citizen, and I suspect the sole reason liberal democracy has been so successful is because it is the “safest” system to be extremely wealthy within.
- fidesomnes 5y ago
  > looks, fame, charm, wit Imagine if any of our elites had this, would a wonderful world it would be. Instead we get ruled by dementia patients and big mouths.
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  The halo effect means that attractive people are more likely to end up in charge or wealthy. Many qualities contribute to attractiveness, mainly height, but charm and wit also work.
  - chaircher 5y ago
    Additionally it's another feedback loop: Wealth makes people physically attractive. Posture, retinol creams, tailored clothes, and a good hair cut can do a lot to transform someone's life.
- ummonk 5y ago
  There are plenty of nations or periods of history where the ultra rich acquired their fortunes due to their power rather than vice versa.
- WaitWaitWha 5y ago
  I am not sure, but I conjecture that Internet "influencers" fall into the elites group. They often do not have money when they start out.
  - moksly 5y ago
    Are they really impactful though? Maybe in terms of selling things, but have the Kardashians (or whoever is the biggest influencer) impacted the world the same way that someone like Rudolph Murdoch has?
    - listenallyall 5y ago
      You're picking and choosing. Murdoch is rich AND (or because) he owns a global media organization, which provides influence/impact. Plenty of billionaires have tiny impact or influence, or just in a small niche, in fact, most of them you probably wouldn't even recognize their name.
      - moksly 5y ago
        Those billionaires still have the means to impact the world in ways that you or I do not, should they chose to do so.
        listenallyall 5y ago
        Make a coherent argument. You were comparing to the Kardashians, who are massively influential, not to "you or I". And so what "if they choose to"? They've chosen not to.
        filmgirlcw 5y ago
        But to use your example, the Kardashian’s are billionaires, meaning they could impact the world should they choose to. And Murdoch, to use your other example, didn’t start to build his global influence until the 1980s, some 30 years into his career. And although the global influence of his media groups isn’t debatable, it is important to note that the vast majority of his newspaper properties are tabloids.
- simonh 5y ago
  The reason liberal democracy is so successful is because it's the safest system to become wealthy in through means that don't involve influence in a bureaucracy or paying off gatekeepers*. That means essentially anyone can become successful, which unleashes the potential of a much bigger proportion of the populace. This makes freer societies dramatically more innovative, industrious and successful. * Gatekeepers still exist in liberal democracies, no system is perfect, but they don't control everything. The freer a society is, the less control and influence bureaucracies and gatekeepers have, and the bigger the incentives are for gatekeepers to help others achieve success.
  - jvanderbot 5y ago
    That's a nostalgic sentiment.
    - gumby 5y ago
      It’s possible to return to that prelapsarian state (at least to the degree it actually existed)
      - mcguire 5y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 Ah, the good ol' days.
        gumby 5y ago
        Exactly
    - simonh 5y ago
      It's my lived experience. I've watched it happen. Two of my jobs, both of my favourite ones in my careers, were working for companies founded by ordinary people from what I suppose are reasonably call disadvantaged backgrounds. One of them was started by Mo Ibrahim, who started life in Sudan too poor to afford shoes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mo_Ibrahim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mo_Ibrahim
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  There are plenty of wealthy people who have little claim to any sort of elite status, and plenty of elite people who don’t have a lot of wealth. It’s easiest to see it in the following way: there are plenty of elite people in America whose net worth might be “only” a couple million of dollars, but less than $10M. Think, a typical high profile journalist. For comparison, there are probably something like 3-4 million people in America whose household’s net worth is above $10M. Are they all elite? Clearly, not.
  - luckylion 5y ago
    That's the current net cash-wealth, though. If you considered their potential, you might come to a different result. E.g. Bill & Hillary Clinton leaving the White House was, according to him, $16m in debt. His net worth was negative. Two decades later, they made over $200m. But it's obviously not like that money didn't come from the power and influence they've had when they left the White House. Nobody would have paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for a speech of the wife of the former governor of Arkansas and failed presidential candidate. Some have $10m and that's it, and I'd agree, they're not elite. Others have much more, but little of it in cash, and they are elite. Influence can typically be transformed into cash, as the Clintons have shown.
    - xyzzyz 5y ago
      I don’t think that Bill and Hillary Clinton are representative examples of elites that the blog post above is talking about.
  - paulpauper 5y ago
    this 10x Having a lot of money does not in any way equal power or influence. Does anyone know who Jimmy John Liautaud is? He's the founder of the Jimmy Johns sandwich chain. Worth over $1 billion, but people with like Paul Krugman, Glenn Greenwald, and Mathew Yglasis, who have huge platforms, keep dominating the discourse on important issues. Being rich is hardly sufficient to have a large platform. It means you can buy a big house, which looks cool, but it's not nearly enough to make people want to care about your opinions. Having credentials is no guarantee either although i think it helps way more than just having a lot of money. http://greyenlightenment.com/2021/09/06/the-class-structure-of-america/ http://greyenlightenment.com/2021/09/06/the-class-structure-... I think the category for these people would be priests. Elite implies having a lot of power. These journalists and commentators do not have much power in so far as policy or the ability to hire or fire people, but they have considerable influence and reach in terms of having large followings.
- gumby 5y ago
  > I can’t think of a period of human history, or a political system, where the richest families within it, didn’t have much more power than the ordinary citizen You presumably haven’t lived in a society where the powerful become wealthy rather than the wealthy becoming powerful. In republican Rome, the elite families controlled (to a major degree) the expenditures of the state, but their own fortunes waxed and waned. Gaius Julius Caesar came from an old but not especially wealthy family (his was a cadet branch), worked his way up the system (elected a tribune etc — didn’t start at the bottom!) but made his fortune in the usual way, by running Spain and then winning some wars. His chief asset was the Julian name. His friend amd heir, Augustus inverted this system (e.g. was able to pay the national budget out of his own assets). Aristocracies worked this way too — you gained or lost wealth due to your power and proximity to the king, not the other way around. In fact if you became too wealthy it could cost you your fortune or even your life. Modern kleptocracies still operate this way, on scales from Congo to Russia to China.
  - rkk3 5y ago
    > Gaius Julius Caesar came from an old but not especially wealthy family (his was a cadet branch), worked his way up the system (elected a tribune etc — didn’t start at the bottom!) but made his fortune in the usual way, by running Spain and then winning some wars. His chief asset was the Julian name. Gaius Julius Caesar family didn't have the Auctoritas or wealth, but His uncle was Marius, the most important man in Rome and he married at a young age Marius's successor's daughter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Marius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Marius Sharp contrast to Pompey Magnus who was so rich his first foray into public life was using his own funds to raise a private army, without being elected or having imperium, to support Sulla.
    - gumby 5y ago
      You point out another great factor in the example of Julius Caesar: though he married into wealth he was stripped of it before he had any real power, but was able to use other family connections to get back on his feet.
  - moksly 5y ago
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  > but if you zoom out to the helicopter perspective, the biggest “influencers” have always been the oligarchs and the sole requirement for joining their ranks is having lots and lots of money. That, on the other side, sounds very American-centric and contemporary-centric to me. I would say that even though money generally correlates with influence, there were many other factors at play. Feudal nobles of Europe resented and despised the merchant class even if they could not utterly suppress it. Wealthy commoners would have an influence, but holders of hereditary titles would still in many cases be considered above them legally. In countries such as Tsarist Russia, being of noble birth would be way more important than being rich; pre-revolutionary France wasn't too dissimilar. There were strict theocracies where the priestly caste would hold sway. Notably, scholars were considered more prestigious in Jewish societies than businesspeople, which might have contributed to the intellectual strength of the nation that is obvious even now. In Soviet-like systems, real power was held by the nomenklatura consisting of high level apparatchiks, senior members of the Party. You could bribe them, but money wasn't really the most important thing; the most important thing was their intra-Party position, earned over decades of patient scheming against other possible competitors in badly sewn grey suits. Spartans (or, to be more precise, Spartiates, the hereditary top class) would never under any circumstances admit any outsider among them as an equal - even if it meant that their ranks were thinning with each generation to the point of near extinction. Saddam Hussein only trusted his own Tikrit gang and anyone else, rich or smart, was second rank only.
  - shakow 5y ago
    > pre-revolutionary France wasn't too dissimilar. In appearance maybe; if you dig a bit under the varnish, the power exerted by creditors over nobles and even kings quickly appears.
    - cassepipe 5y ago
      There is that and let's not forget that powerful nobles were nobles with estates and/or positions in the state apparatus that directly corresponded to receiving a rent. I'd argue that OP's theory that the wealthy were always in control still holds but what has changed throughout history is what wealth has been (cattle, land, slaves, merchandise-money like gold, credit backed money you name it)
- cryptica 5y ago
  Agreed, it's 100% about money. Sometimes looks and charm can help you to get money, but you need money first in order to be considered an elite. Another effect which I've noticed in the tech industry is how engineers who work at big name, wealthy, monopolistic corporations are treated as superior to engineers who work for no-name companies, even when the engineer's role at the no-name company is far more challenging end requires far more expertise and skill.
- tommymachine 5y ago
  Am I missing something here? The United States at least is a constitutional republic. I must have missed the day in college government class when they renamed that form of government "liberal democracy", presumably in an effort to convince more people to vote for "liberal democrats" as their representatives.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    The United States is a liberal democracy, a constitutional republic, an oligarchy, a military kleptocracy; it is centralized, federated, and a union of equal states; it is an authoritarian scientific bureaucratic apparatus, a traditional common-law community; its judges are elites skimmed from the top of Harvard, men elected by peers, and unqualified friends of the Mayor; it is unicameral and bicameral depending on your location. It is all of these things balanced against one another precariously and stably, at minima, maxima, and saddle points in thousands of millions of dimensions.
    - tommymachine 5y ago
      Ya, if nothing else, the events of the last 2 years have assured me of the United States' "stability".
  - nohuck13 5y ago
    "Liberal" here is just the adjective form of liberty. A "liberal" democracy is a democracy is one that enshrines the classic individual freedoms (speech, assembly, religion...) e.g. the United States. A "illiberal" democracy is a democracy that doesn't, e.g. 20th century Singapore.
    - tommymachine 5y ago
      Weird how none of the founding documents of the US government use either of those words ("liberal" or "democracy"), but they do use the words "constitution" and "republican". I'm sure that artful re-defining of our government format has nothing to do with the infiltration of communism into the education system here.
- karaterobot 5y ago
  I don't know about this. There are too many examples of people who exerted influence due to reasons other than having money: for example, coming from an old family has meant a lot throughout most of history, and while accumulated wealth is a common side effect of that, a king is not typically made a king because they have the most money in the bank, instead because of what I guess Hanson would call the "prestige" of coming from a particular bloodline. The aristocracy in many places and times in history have been influential while being cash poor, at least compared to those filthy parvenus in the merchant and banking classes. In terms of soft power influence, I think it's easy to mix up cause and effect. Is Jeff Bezos one of the most influential people in the world? Yes. Is he one of the richest people in the world? Yes. But, is he influential because he's rich, or rich as a side effect of the influential company he started? I'd argue the latter. There have also been too many changes to what we call wealth to consider it the single constant in the history of power: would money today even be recognizable as a concept to someone from 3000 BC? The same goes with what we call influence: Martin Luther was one of the most influential people in history, and wealth was not a factor in that.
- j7ake 5y ago
  I think in United States it has always been money. But in other cultures it may be something else. For example, during the Edo society in Japan, merchants were near the bottom of the social hierarchy even though they could have been richer than some aristocrats.
- robocat 5y ago
  The whole quote was "As a book I recently reviewed explains in great detail, elites are selected primarily for their prestige and status, which has many contributions, including money, looks, fame, charm, wit, positions of power, etc.". The book is Lauren A. Rivera’s 'Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs' https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691155623/pedigree https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691155623/pe... which gives the tagline "How social class determines who lands the best jobs". Robin Hanson's review of the book: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/11/what-makes-prestige.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/11/what-makes-prestige.h... I completely disagree money is all that matters. I expect the book explains why other markers of prestige/status are deeply important. We can all name influential people that are not wealthy - which proves that money isn't everything. I think it is rude to selectively quote someone who has gone to the effort to point to what backs up their statement. You are disagreeing with a book, not Robin.
- netcan 5y ago
  It's interesting how we all project a moral position, in defining what sits across from elites... representing everyone else. The blog puts a lot of weight on prestige and attention, celebrity in it's expert-elite division. "People are far more interested in talking with elites in elite mode on most topics, than in talking with the clear relevant experts in expert mode" There's a "some animals are more equal" retort to this, IMO. If attention and prestige was showered onto the real experts, in expert mode, then they would be the celebrities. Are you concerned about elitism, or the quality of elites? You're addressing elitism more broadly. I sort of agree with you in principle, but I think you're discounting how much breadth the principle allows. It's definitely true that most societies have elites and power structures. But, there's a pretty big range of how that works. Nobel prizes are actually a good example. It's an intentional, symbolic piece of elitism... they kind of things that an archaeologist or historian might note. It doesn't relate to majhor power structures very directly though.
- andreilys 5y ago
  At least I can’t think of a period of human history, or a political system, where the richest families within it, didn’t have much more power than the ordinary citizen Bolshevik Revolution, China's revolution, Iran's Islamic revolution... Plenty of examples of middle class/upper middle class leaders overthrowing the richest families and seizing control. Now in most cases those who take control end up enriching themselves but the point still stands.
  - fisheuler 5y ago
    yes, especially the culture revolution initialed and directed by Mao in the sixties period of china。 Mao wanted to throw the top Party bureaucracy with the help of the bottom people, but the endeavor have failed. Hope we can find a suitable mechanism to cope with this worldwide hard problem.
- fallingfrog 5y ago
  Bingo. The people with all the political power, and the people with all the economic power, are always the same people. In every civilization in history.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  In the middle ages some nobility could be quite cash poor and still have influence. Go back far enough and rulership came out of how many armed men you had loyal to you. Today, certainly, having lots of money generally gives a person a lot of decisive power as well as general influence (the wealthy are indeed called the ruling class by some). But OP's argument kind of falls into incoherence given that "elites" is an utterly vague term. The famous and the attractive have some influence, some uniqueness but so do those with expertise, they're a kind of "elite" if we're being that vague.
- narrator 5y ago
  How about communist societies? What about feudalism? In modern China, billionaires get cancelled and even executed on a regular basis if they go against the party.
jonahbenton 5y ago
That piece is a self-own. Whatever expertise Robin has as an economist simply does not translate into psychological / sociological / anthropological analysis.
- karol 5y ago
  Are you saying he is pontificating to be counted among the elites?
soohyung 5y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20210825201442/https://overcomingbias.com/2021/02/experts-versus-elites.html/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210825201442/https://overcoming...
ghassanmas 5y ago
I am happy that there are such a discussion exists, understanding the problem is the first step toward resolving it. I hope we as humans being, would eventually learn and apply a better system for handling decisions that affect the public. I do think that it might take time however I am kinda optimistic.
SubiculumCode 5y ago
I recently ran into a reddit post in which a young individual (low 30's) just got a job at University of California, and was seeking advice on retirement investments. He claimed that he expected to make 300+ grand a year at the UC. New assistant professors start sub 100k, and most top-tier professors near the end of their careers can reach 200+k a year, not counting benefits. What job is this 30 year old getting at the UC that starts at 300k? It must be in the CEO track, where they assume they should be paid most, and somehow, do so. It is often argued that CEO's deserve extraordinary salaries on the basis that they are smarter than most people...but when you work at a University, you know a lot of people who extraordinarily intelligent people who are familiar with running large, complex organizations/programs. There is no way those CEO's deserve more than they do. It purely a culture and power thing. And its bloody disgusting.
- overeater 5y ago
  You're generalizing too much by averaging averages, so that your numbers are off. Salaries depend on university, campus, field, etc. These are average salaries over 5 years ago: "The Daily Californian created a database of professor pay-checkers in 2016 that shows the variation in inter-departmental salaries for the 2015 year. For example, average professor salary was $326,230 for the economics department, $202,711 for the electrical engineering department and $163,035 for the English department."
- paulpauper 5y ago
  salaries for professional/college-req. jobs have really swelled in the past decade.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  I would rather pay a CEO more than an educational bureaucrat cause you can at least fire the CEO.
eplanit 5y ago
"When an academic wins a Nobel prize, they have achieved a pinnacle of expertise. At which point they often start to wax philosophic, and writing op-eds. They seem to be making a bid to become an elite. Because we all respect and want to associate with elites far more than with experts. Elites far less often lust after becoming experts, because we are often willing to treat elites as if they are experts. For example, when a journalist writes a popular book on science, they are often willing to field science questions when they give a talk on their book. And the rest of us are far more interested in hearing them talk on the subject than the scientists they write about." Not one single sentence of that paragraph is true. When an academic wins a Nobel prize, they have achieved a pinnacle of expertise. No, they've achieved celebrity status (perhaps well-earned by being a top expert). There are those who are experts, but who do not get Nobel prizes. It's not a perfect prize. They seem to be making a bid to become an elite. They don't get the prize because the ask for it or buy it, and the celebrity status comes with it automatically. Some recipients capitalize on it, for sure. I think "the elites" bring them into their circles on their own. Because we all respect and want to associate with elites far more than with experts. No, we all don't. For example, when a journalist writes a popular book on science...the rest of us are far more interested in hearing them talk on the subject than the scientists they write about. I think many (maybe not enough, for sure) don't see 'journalists' as scientific experts. For your Sanjay Guptas it may be true, but he's not a true journalist .
- PeterisP 5y ago
  It's also worth noting the time delay between winning a Nobel prize and the work for which the prize is received - which generally is 20 or perhaps even 30 years. They were at a pinnacle of expertise decades before winning the Nobel prize, and arguably might not be there anymore when they do get the award - which essentially is the point of transforming from an expert to elite status.
- actuallyalys 5y ago
  >For example, when a journalist writes a popular book on science...the rest of us are far more interested in hearing them talk on the subject than the scientists they write about. I think many (maybe not enough, for sure) don't see 'journalists' as scientific experts. For your Sanjay Guptas it may be true, but he's not a true journalist . Yeah, this seems dubious to me. For one thing, I think people are plenty interested in pop sci books written by experts—hence all the books by doctors that include "MD" after their name on the cover. Of course, sometimes the MD doesn't indicate expertise in the topic they're writing in, but I suspect a book marketed as "pediatrician and pediatrics researcher Dr. So-and So writes about [childhood health topic]" would probably do better than "Dr. So-and-So, MD, writes about [childhood health topic]." For another thing, there are other plausible explanations than a preference for elites—journalists are more experienced at writing for a general audience and they may have more connections to mass market publishers (rather than academic publishers). I'd also argue communicating science is a separate skill from doing science. I think all scientists have at least a modicum of skill at communicating science to their peers, but journalists can very well have more experience in communicating science to the public than scientists. It's confusing since Hanson acknowledges communication as a kind of expertise when he refers to journalists as "news experts" elsewhere in the post.
bo1024 5y ago
The intriguing part is not that elites get to make decisions instead of experts (that's practically the definition of elite), but that people seem to prefer listening to elites. The panel vs talk example resonated with me. I think a resolution, though, is that real expert knowledge -- things we know for sure -- quickly becomes commoditized, disseminated, and boring. You wouldn't ask a panel how to repair a car engine that's developed a knock. But you might ask them how long until electric vehicles outsell gasoline. So most "interesting" questions, by definition fall outside of anyone's range of expertise (even if expertise can be relevant to answering well). In fact, influenced by Taleb, I wonder if a better model of the world is that almost every question is actually either "every expert knows and agrees on the answer" or "nobody knows and any predictions or arguing about it are almost purely entertainment". Nobody's interested in discussing Type 1 questions, and you might as well listen to elites as experts when it comes to Type 2.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Hmm. Maybe the elites know how to be more entertaining. If you're listening to an answer to a type 2 question, you might as well get entertainment with the answer, because you're not going to get actual knowledge.
- qsort 5y ago
  > Nobody's interested in discussing Type 1 questions, and you might as well listen to elites as experts when it comes to Type 2. Technical issues matter, though. If experts disagree on something, it doesn't mean they disagree on everything, and this sublety is unfortunately often lost when the discussion moves on to "full elite mode". It's patently obvious on IT/software development/AI subjects, where people who can't write hello world come out of the blue to inform us there's going to be a singluar aipocalypse or whatever it's called now. There definitely exist topics where it's anybody's guess, but my model is that this is - once more - an epiphenomenon of our inability to effectively incorporate proper science and scientific thought in the public debate.
- postsantum 5y ago
  They prefer to side with people who look more powerful and give them a sense of identity, especially when it comes to contrarian opinions. Nerdy experts certainly don't cut it
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stopnamingnuts 5y ago
Pretty dour commentary on human nature. There's a kernel of something worth considering but sacrifices nuance in favor of a crafted idea. As a member of the described expert class, I'd say we have limitations equal to those of elites. That's not examined.
interlocutor2 5y ago
I read the examples as a different architype. Not elites but communicators. Experts write to be carefully technically correct, standing up to the scrutiny of other experts. Pop-sci or more general communicators write to express the ideas in a fun or relatable way, sometimes mangling them. Just like other mass media, popular = lowest common denominator.
pphysch 5y ago
The author is lumping management & aristocracy into one group and calling it "elites". This sort of unjustified & useless ontologizing is one of the mainstays of the Rationalist crowd. But it sure is fun.
paulpauper 5y ago
Finally, consider that recently I went into clear expert mode to release a formal preprint on grabby aliens, which induced almost no (< 10) comments on this blog or Twitter, in contrast to far more comments when arguable-elites discuss it in panelist/elite mode: Scott Aaronson (205), Scott Alexander (108), and Hacker News (110). People are far more interested in talking with elites in elite mode on most topics, than in talking with the clear relevant experts in expert mode. This can obviously be explained by them having bigger audiences/platforms.
- Kronopath 5y ago
  Partly that, but I think there are also other explanations. 1: I think Scott Aaronson is a better communicator than Robin Hanson, at least in the posts in question. Having read some of the blog posts that went into the pre-read, and then Scott Aaronson’s summary of it, Aaronson does a better job at summarizing the research, connecting it with our day-to-day lives, and making it more fun to read. It has less detail, but that’s arguably a good thing: I don’t need a huge amount of detail on theoretical models for extraterrestrial civilizations, I don’t have the time or energy for that. It’s interesting, but I don’t want to spend hours today reading multiple different blog posts and an academic paper trying to grok the particulars. (I personally have a pet peeve in that I feel like the typical “style” of academic papers is very bad for communication in general.) 2: WRT Hacker News and /r/SlateStarCodex, people comment there because they want to discuss it among their “tribe”. Wandering onto a stranger’s blog and putting something in the comments can be an anxiety-inducing affair: you don’t know what the people there are like, you don’t what their rules or (sub-)culture is like. You might not fit in, or you might even piss off the author. Meanwhile, I could probably guess pretty accurately what kind of comments are going to show up in any given popular HN story, and how to discuss things in such a way that it would go over well here.
  - asimjalis 5y ago
    Good analysis. And maybe the expert vs elite distinction is similar to the distinction between low-level detail vs higher-level summary combined with accessible analogies.
raspasov 5y ago
False dichotomy. Much more useful to think about most things (esp. societal and behavioral) as a spectrum. Very few things are completely black and white.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Is this something you can expand on, or just another argument to moderation?
  - raspasov 5y ago
    Experts vs Elites are made-up categories. More categories can be arbitrarily created. For example, Experts vs Elites vs Workers. Or Experts vs Elites vs Workers vs Long-term unemployed. I haven't seen solid evidence for splitting the world in such categories. It definitely makes for entertaining demagoguery but not much more. Such categories also completely exclude the concept of time from the analysis. It's like trying to judge a movie from a single random screenshot. I.e. a person might be a worker today, expert in 3 years, and later suffer from depressive symptoms and be chronically unemployed.
netcan 5y ago
There's a certain kind of innocence to this. "Elites" are one half of many popular dichotomies, and the term takes a lot of meaning from whatever it's being compared to. Elite is a morally evocative term, and that tends to surface a users values, and what we find outrageous. Robin associates elite with celebrity, prestige and credit... expertise with a lack of it. Unfairness and dishonesty in how status and prestige are allocated. Personally, I separate large parts of the celebrity aspects from this whole tangle. Celebrity scientists, engineers and such are a great thing. Why should the celebrity sphere only contain socialites, athletes, actors, musicians, billionaires. Something like the nobel prize ceremonially designates someone a celebrity scientist. That's not a terrible thing. Like any other idol, they represent something. Reality is always more complex, but idols embody simple stereotypes that they represent.Watch a small nation bring home a gold in women's judo. Two years later judo is often a thriving sport with many high achievers. Idols are values, and values impacts like this. Doing the same for medicine or physics works the same way. I get that people feel celebrity worship is vapid idolatry, but every society worships stuff... often designated hero types. Subcultures too. Led Zeppelin, Elon Musk, Mother Theressa, etc. Why not worship a scientist, if we're always worshipping somebody anyway?
- deleted 5y ago
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mertd 5y ago
Clubhouse in a nutshell
sesm 5y ago
Aren’t diplomacy, management and public speech areas of expertise too?
Animats 5y ago
Now we have "influencers", which are neither experts nor elites, but merely visible. That used to be a tiny niche. Now it's a career path. Angelyne was probably the first to pull this off in modern times. She used to have billboards all over LA, with her name and picture. She became famous for being famous, without performing or accomplishing much. She's on the California recall election ballot right now. Somewhere between a third and three-quarters of kids, depending on survey, now want to be YouTubers when they grow up.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  they are experts at that which they are influencing Someone who does YouTube comedy for a living is probably an expert at both comedy and youtube.
wolverine876 5y ago
The author throws away their own and our power - it's up to you (and me) to evaluate elites and experts and to influence your community and decide what happens there. All elites and experts can do is attempt to persuade other people, but it's really up to those other people. There are endless examples of the public ignoring the elites and experts. > This also helps explain why artists are said to “contribute to important conversations” by making documentaries, etc. that express “emotional truths.” They present themselves as qualifying elites by virtue of their superior art abilities. Artists are 'experts' in observing, conceiving, and expressing the world that is and the world that isn't. Many experts in their own domains overlook the real issue, misunderstand it, have failures of imagination, and fail to express themselves effectively.
- User23 5y ago
  > All elites and experts can do is attempt to persuade other people Experts rarely persuade anyone, and when they do it's usually another expert in the same field. So much for expertise. Meanwhile, being successful at persuasion is one of the defining characteristics of high social status. Napoleon was dead broke when he escaped from Elba, but by the time he made it to Paris virtually the entire French army was marching with him. It's hard to be more elite than being a beloved emperor who persuades the usurping king's army to join him. Another way you can tell social status is mate selection. For example, Elon Musk is clearly not just rich, but socially elite. Consider the difference between the women he is with compared to the obvious wildly rich but low sociosexual status nerds like Zuckerberg.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  I don't think he means to claim that we don't have an active role in this. The argument is that when you're trying to listen to the experts, you have to be careful, because it's easy to end up listening only to elites who claim to represent the experts.
lamontcg 5y ago
ironic that this is published on a blog called "overcoming bias".
mybrid 5y ago
I'd contrast this by watching a season of HBO's "Entourage". I find it interesting that actors who are those with the least expertise and least value of conversation have talent agents and publicists whereas the experts have little to no talent agents or publicists. Why not just hire a publicist to write popular versions of the technical stuff that the expert feels accurately portray the technical innards? The ability to communicate with the masses is talent independent of other expertise. One can be talented in both that's what it is, two talents. Finally, America's corruption right now is off the charts. One cannot take seriously any critique of America's elite without factoring in the huge amount of influence corruption is having at all levels of elitism in this country. So I couldn't take this seriously. America is weird.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  What corruption exists in the US? Short of politicians and lobbyists (since thats obvious), where else does it occur? As far as I'm concerned, family politics and inheritances are not corrupt.
mybrid 5y ago
Side note; Disqus has a terrible reputation for selling user data. https://victorzhou.com/blog/replacing-disqus/ https://victorzhou.com/blog/replacing-disqus/ I tend to avoid any site that uses it.
motohagiography 5y ago
I'd posit that elites are just the objects of mimetic desire, where experts have expertise, they're almost completely unrelated outside narrow fields. Elites are the people you want to be like, and sometimes who we envy as a result.
cgrealy 5y ago
> As we saw early in the pandemic, the elites are always visibly chattering among themselves about the topics of the day, and when they form a new opinion, the experts usually quickly cave to agree with them, and try to pretend they agreed all along. My experience was the opposite in most of the world, where experts recommended lockdowns and masks and most political "elites" (especially in the US and UK) ignoring that to the chagrin of the experts.
- etangent 5y ago
  Cases when experts propose something and then elites disagree with the experts are not surprising. It is the default state of affairs everywhere in the world. That's a "dog bites man" situation---essentially a non-story. What is really surprising (and revealing) is when elites do propose something and then experts follow along even though it runs against their previous opinion from just a week ago. For a vivid example: most experts before the pandemic agreed that masks help limit spread of respiratory diseases, yet nevertheless in the very first few weeks of the pandemic most of them followed along with the completely unscientific claim that masks do not help and that everyone should simply wash their hands instead. Likewise, we had expert voices making sophisticated arguments that shutting down international travel would do nothing to limit spread of the virus---a claim that a middle-schooler would call out as largely bullshit.
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    I suspect that by the time anybody suggested shutting down international travel (at least in the US), it was far too late to make a difference. The virus was already widespread, with no hope of containing it.
- dexen 5y ago
  What you describe is matter of selection bias: in fields as crowded as public health and medicine, experts voice all sorts of advice, citing all kinds of research, and often contradicting each other. At the end of the day, we regular citizens usually hear from those experts that got their voices amplified by operators of platforms (journalism, political institutions, etc.). In Robin's terms, the elites choose from the crowd of experts those that they like the advice the best.
rendall 5y ago
> Consider news articles versus columnists. The news articles are written by news experts, in full expert mode. I read much more skeptically from this point on. It almost seems the motivation for the entire post is due to the lack of reaction to his "grabby aliens" post

169 points by asimjalis 5y ago

> elites are selected primarily for their prestige and status, which has many contributions, including money, looks, fame, charm, wit, positions of power, etc. I’d argue that it’s only money. Prestige, looks, charm, wit and even positions of power come and go and rich people have always surrounded themselves with those the same way they have always surrounded themselves with experts. At its core, I don’t think human society has really changed that much since the dawn of organised civilisation. Sure we’ve tried different some very systems over the thousands of years, but if you zoom out to the helicopter perspective, the biggest “influencers” have always been the oligarchs and the sole requirement for joining their ranks is having lots and lots of money. At least I can’t think of a period of human history, or a political system, where the richest families within it, didn’t have much more power than the ordinary citizen, and I suspect the sole reason liberal democracy has been so successful is because it is the “safest” system to be extremely wealthy within.

fidesomnes 5y ago
> looks, fame, charm, wit Imagine if any of our elites had this, would a wonderful world it would be. Instead we get ruled by dementia patients and big mouths.
R0b0t1 5y ago
The halo effect means that attractive people are more likely to end up in charge or wealthy. Many qualities contribute to attractiveness, mainly height, but charm and wit also work.
- chaircher 5y ago
  Additionally it's another feedback loop: Wealth makes people physically attractive. Posture, retinol creams, tailored clothes, and a good hair cut can do a lot to transform someone's life.
ummonk 5y ago
There are plenty of nations or periods of history where the ultra rich acquired their fortunes due to their power rather than vice versa.
WaitWaitWha 5y ago
I am not sure, but I conjecture that Internet "influencers" fall into the elites group. They often do not have money when they start out.
- moksly 5y ago
  Are they really impactful though? Maybe in terms of selling things, but have the Kardashians (or whoever is the biggest influencer) impacted the world the same way that someone like Rudolph Murdoch has?
  - listenallyall 5y ago
    You're picking and choosing. Murdoch is rich AND (or because) he owns a global media organization, which provides influence/impact. Plenty of billionaires have tiny impact or influence, or just in a small niche, in fact, most of them you probably wouldn't even recognize their name.
    - moksly 5y ago
      Those billionaires still have the means to impact the world in ways that you or I do not, should they chose to do so.
      - listenallyall 5y ago
        Make a coherent argument. You were comparing to the Kardashians, who are massively influential, not to "you or I". And so what "if they choose to"? They've chosen not to.
      - filmgirlcw 5y ago
        But to use your example, the Kardashian’s are billionaires, meaning they could impact the world should they choose to. And Murdoch, to use your other example, didn’t start to build his global influence until the 1980s, some 30 years into his career. And although the global influence of his media groups isn’t debatable, it is important to note that the vast majority of his newspaper properties are tabloids.
simonh 5y ago
The reason liberal democracy is so successful is because it's the safest system to become wealthy in through means that don't involve influence in a bureaucracy or paying off gatekeepers*. That means essentially anyone can become successful, which unleashes the potential of a much bigger proportion of the populace. This makes freer societies dramatically more innovative, industrious and successful. * Gatekeepers still exist in liberal democracies, no system is perfect, but they don't control everything. The freer a society is, the less control and influence bureaucracies and gatekeepers have, and the bigger the incentives are for gatekeepers to help others achieve success.
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  That's a nostalgic sentiment.
  - gumby 5y ago
    It’s possible to return to that prelapsarian state (at least to the degree it actually existed)
    - mcguire 5y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 Ah, the good ol' days.
      - gumby 5y ago
        Exactly
  - simonh 5y ago
    It's my lived experience. I've watched it happen. Two of my jobs, both of my favourite ones in my careers, were working for companies founded by ordinary people from what I suppose are reasonably call disadvantaged backgrounds. One of them was started by Mo Ibrahim, who started life in Sudan too poor to afford shoes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mo_Ibrahim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mo_Ibrahim
xyzzyz 5y ago
There are plenty of wealthy people who have little claim to any sort of elite status, and plenty of elite people who don’t have a lot of wealth. It’s easiest to see it in the following way: there are plenty of elite people in America whose net worth might be “only” a couple million of dollars, but less than $10M. Think, a typical high profile journalist. For comparison, there are probably something like 3-4 million people in America whose household’s net worth is above $10M. Are they all elite? Clearly, not.
- luckylion 5y ago
  That's the current net cash-wealth, though. If you considered their potential, you might come to a different result. E.g. Bill & Hillary Clinton leaving the White House was, according to him, $16m in debt. His net worth was negative. Two decades later, they made over $200m. But it's obviously not like that money didn't come from the power and influence they've had when they left the White House. Nobody would have paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for a speech of the wife of the former governor of Arkansas and failed presidential candidate. Some have $10m and that's it, and I'd agree, they're not elite. Others have much more, but little of it in cash, and they are elite. Influence can typically be transformed into cash, as the Clintons have shown.
  - xyzzyz 5y ago
    I don’t think that Bill and Hillary Clinton are representative examples of elites that the blog post above is talking about.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  this 10x Having a lot of money does not in any way equal power or influence. Does anyone know who Jimmy John Liautaud is? He's the founder of the Jimmy Johns sandwich chain. Worth over $1 billion, but people with like Paul Krugman, Glenn Greenwald, and Mathew Yglasis, who have huge platforms, keep dominating the discourse on important issues. Being rich is hardly sufficient to have a large platform. It means you can buy a big house, which looks cool, but it's not nearly enough to make people want to care about your opinions. Having credentials is no guarantee either although i think it helps way more than just having a lot of money. http://greyenlightenment.com/2021/09/06/the-class-structure-of-america/ http://greyenlightenment.com/2021/09/06/the-class-structure-... I think the category for these people would be priests. Elite implies having a lot of power. These journalists and commentators do not have much power in so far as policy or the ability to hire or fire people, but they have considerable influence and reach in terms of having large followings.
gumby 5y ago
> I can’t think of a period of human history, or a political system, where the richest families within it, didn’t have much more power than the ordinary citizen You presumably haven’t lived in a society where the powerful become wealthy rather than the wealthy becoming powerful. In republican Rome, the elite families controlled (to a major degree) the expenditures of the state, but their own fortunes waxed and waned. Gaius Julius Caesar came from an old but not especially wealthy family (his was a cadet branch), worked his way up the system (elected a tribune etc — didn’t start at the bottom!) but made his fortune in the usual way, by running Spain and then winning some wars. His chief asset was the Julian name. His friend amd heir, Augustus inverted this system (e.g. was able to pay the national budget out of his own assets). Aristocracies worked this way too — you gained or lost wealth due to your power and proximity to the king, not the other way around. In fact if you became too wealthy it could cost you your fortune or even your life. Modern kleptocracies still operate this way, on scales from Congo to Russia to China.
- rkk3 5y ago
  > Gaius Julius Caesar came from an old but not especially wealthy family (his was a cadet branch), worked his way up the system (elected a tribune etc — didn’t start at the bottom!) but made his fortune in the usual way, by running Spain and then winning some wars. His chief asset was the Julian name. Gaius Julius Caesar family didn't have the Auctoritas or wealth, but His uncle was Marius, the most important man in Rome and he married at a young age Marius's successor's daughter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Marius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Marius Sharp contrast to Pompey Magnus who was so rich his first foray into public life was using his own funds to raise a private army, without being elected or having imperium, to support Sulla.
  - gumby 5y ago
    You point out another great factor in the example of Julius Caesar: though he married into wealth he was stripped of it before he had any real power, but was able to use other family connections to get back on his feet.
- moksly 5y ago
inglor_cz 5y ago
> but if you zoom out to the helicopter perspective, the biggest “influencers” have always been the oligarchs and the sole requirement for joining their ranks is having lots and lots of money. That, on the other side, sounds very American-centric and contemporary-centric to me. I would say that even though money generally correlates with influence, there were many other factors at play. Feudal nobles of Europe resented and despised the merchant class even if they could not utterly suppress it. Wealthy commoners would have an influence, but holders of hereditary titles would still in many cases be considered above them legally. In countries such as Tsarist Russia, being of noble birth would be way more important than being rich; pre-revolutionary France wasn't too dissimilar. There were strict theocracies where the priestly caste would hold sway. Notably, scholars were considered more prestigious in Jewish societies than businesspeople, which might have contributed to the intellectual strength of the nation that is obvious even now. In Soviet-like systems, real power was held by the nomenklatura consisting of high level apparatchiks, senior members of the Party. You could bribe them, but money wasn't really the most important thing; the most important thing was their intra-Party position, earned over decades of patient scheming against other possible competitors in badly sewn grey suits. Spartans (or, to be more precise, Spartiates, the hereditary top class) would never under any circumstances admit any outsider among them as an equal - even if it meant that their ranks were thinning with each generation to the point of near extinction. Saddam Hussein only trusted his own Tikrit gang and anyone else, rich or smart, was second rank only.
- shakow 5y ago
  > pre-revolutionary France wasn't too dissimilar. In appearance maybe; if you dig a bit under the varnish, the power exerted by creditors over nobles and even kings quickly appears.
  - cassepipe 5y ago
    There is that and let's not forget that powerful nobles were nobles with estates and/or positions in the state apparatus that directly corresponded to receiving a rent. I'd argue that OP's theory that the wealthy were always in control still holds but what has changed throughout history is what wealth has been (cattle, land, slaves, merchandise-money like gold, credit backed money you name it)
cryptica 5y ago
Agreed, it's 100% about money. Sometimes looks and charm can help you to get money, but you need money first in order to be considered an elite. Another effect which I've noticed in the tech industry is how engineers who work at big name, wealthy, monopolistic corporations are treated as superior to engineers who work for no-name companies, even when the engineer's role at the no-name company is far more challenging end requires far more expertise and skill.
tommymachine 5y ago
Am I missing something here? The United States at least is a constitutional republic. I must have missed the day in college government class when they renamed that form of government "liberal democracy", presumably in an effort to convince more people to vote for "liberal democrats" as their representatives.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  The United States is a liberal democracy, a constitutional republic, an oligarchy, a military kleptocracy; it is centralized, federated, and a union of equal states; it is an authoritarian scientific bureaucratic apparatus, a traditional common-law community; its judges are elites skimmed from the top of Harvard, men elected by peers, and unqualified friends of the Mayor; it is unicameral and bicameral depending on your location. It is all of these things balanced against one another precariously and stably, at minima, maxima, and saddle points in thousands of millions of dimensions.
  - tommymachine 5y ago
    Ya, if nothing else, the events of the last 2 years have assured me of the United States' "stability".
- nohuck13 5y ago
  "Liberal" here is just the adjective form of liberty. A "liberal" democracy is a democracy is one that enshrines the classic individual freedoms (speech, assembly, religion...) e.g. the United States. A "illiberal" democracy is a democracy that doesn't, e.g. 20th century Singapore.
  - tommymachine 5y ago
    Weird how none of the founding documents of the US government use either of those words ("liberal" or "democracy"), but they do use the words "constitution" and "republican". I'm sure that artful re-defining of our government format has nothing to do with the infiltration of communism into the education system here.
karaterobot 5y ago
I don't know about this. There are too many examples of people who exerted influence due to reasons other than having money: for example, coming from an old family has meant a lot throughout most of history, and while accumulated wealth is a common side effect of that, a king is not typically made a king because they have the most money in the bank, instead because of what I guess Hanson would call the "prestige" of coming from a particular bloodline. The aristocracy in many places and times in history have been influential while being cash poor, at least compared to those filthy parvenus in the merchant and banking classes. In terms of soft power influence, I think it's easy to mix up cause and effect. Is Jeff Bezos one of the most influential people in the world? Yes. Is he one of the richest people in the world? Yes. But, is he influential because he's rich, or rich as a side effect of the influential company he started? I'd argue the latter. There have also been too many changes to what we call wealth to consider it the single constant in the history of power: would money today even be recognizable as a concept to someone from 3000 BC? The same goes with what we call influence: Martin Luther was one of the most influential people in history, and wealth was not a factor in that.
j7ake 5y ago
I think in United States it has always been money. But in other cultures it may be something else. For example, during the Edo society in Japan, merchants were near the bottom of the social hierarchy even though they could have been richer than some aristocrats.
robocat 5y ago
The whole quote was "As a book I recently reviewed explains in great detail, elites are selected primarily for their prestige and status, which has many contributions, including money, looks, fame, charm, wit, positions of power, etc.". The book is Lauren A. Rivera’s 'Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs' https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691155623/pedigree https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691155623/pe... which gives the tagline "How social class determines who lands the best jobs". Robin Hanson's review of the book: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/11/what-makes-prestige.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/11/what-makes-prestige.h... I completely disagree money is all that matters. I expect the book explains why other markers of prestige/status are deeply important. We can all name influential people that are not wealthy - which proves that money isn't everything. I think it is rude to selectively quote someone who has gone to the effort to point to what backs up their statement. You are disagreeing with a book, not Robin.
netcan 5y ago
It's interesting how we all project a moral position, in defining what sits across from elites... representing everyone else. The blog puts a lot of weight on prestige and attention, celebrity in it's expert-elite division. "People are far more interested in talking with elites in elite mode on most topics, than in talking with the clear relevant experts in expert mode" There's a "some animals are more equal" retort to this, IMO. If attention and prestige was showered onto the real experts, in expert mode, then they would be the celebrities. Are you concerned about elitism, or the quality of elites? You're addressing elitism more broadly. I sort of agree with you in principle, but I think you're discounting how much breadth the principle allows. It's definitely true that most societies have elites and power structures. But, there's a pretty big range of how that works. Nobel prizes are actually a good example. It's an intentional, symbolic piece of elitism... they kind of things that an archaeologist or historian might note. It doesn't relate to majhor power structures very directly though.
andreilys 5y ago
At least I can’t think of a period of human history, or a political system, where the richest families within it, didn’t have much more power than the ordinary citizen Bolshevik Revolution, China's revolution, Iran's Islamic revolution... Plenty of examples of middle class/upper middle class leaders overthrowing the richest families and seizing control. Now in most cases those who take control end up enriching themselves but the point still stands.
- fisheuler 5y ago
  yes, especially the culture revolution initialed and directed by Mao in the sixties period of china。 Mao wanted to throw the top Party bureaucracy with the help of the bottom people, but the endeavor have failed. Hope we can find a suitable mechanism to cope with this worldwide hard problem.
fallingfrog 5y ago
Bingo. The people with all the political power, and the people with all the economic power, are always the same people. In every civilization in history.
joe_the_user 5y ago
In the middle ages some nobility could be quite cash poor and still have influence. Go back far enough and rulership came out of how many armed men you had loyal to you. Today, certainly, having lots of money generally gives a person a lot of decisive power as well as general influence (the wealthy are indeed called the ruling class by some). But OP's argument kind of falls into incoherence given that "elites" is an utterly vague term. The famous and the attractive have some influence, some uniqueness but so do those with expertise, they're a kind of "elite" if we're being that vague.
narrator 5y ago
How about communist societies? What about feudalism? In modern China, billionaires get cancelled and even executed on a regular basis if they go against the party.

jonahbenton 5y ago

That piece is a self-own. Whatever expertise Robin has as an economist simply does not translate into psychological / sociological / anthropological analysis.

karol 5y ago
Are you saying he is pontificating to be counted among the elites?

soohyung 5y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20210825201442/https://overcomingbias.com/2021/02/experts-versus-elites.html/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210825201442/https://overcoming...

ghassanmas 5y ago

I am happy that there are such a discussion exists, understanding the problem is the first step toward resolving it. I hope we as humans being, would eventually learn and apply a better system for handling decisions that affect the public. I do think that it might take time however I am kinda optimistic.

SubiculumCode 5y ago

I recently ran into a reddit post in which a young individual (low 30's) just got a job at University of California, and was seeking advice on retirement investments. He claimed that he expected to make 300+ grand a year at the UC. New assistant professors start sub 100k, and most top-tier professors near the end of their careers can reach 200+k a year, not counting benefits. What job is this 30 year old getting at the UC that starts at 300k? It must be in the CEO track, where they assume they should be paid most, and somehow, do so. It is often argued that CEO's deserve extraordinary salaries on the basis that they are smarter than most people...but when you work at a University, you know a lot of people who extraordinarily intelligent people who are familiar with running large, complex organizations/programs. There is no way those CEO's deserve more than they do. It purely a culture and power thing. And its bloody disgusting.

overeater 5y ago
You're generalizing too much by averaging averages, so that your numbers are off. Salaries depend on university, campus, field, etc. These are average salaries over 5 years ago: "The Daily Californian created a database of professor pay-checkers in 2016 that shows the variation in inter-departmental salaries for the 2015 year. For example, average professor salary was $326,230 for the economics department, $202,711 for the electrical engineering department and $163,035 for the English department."
paulpauper 5y ago
salaries for professional/college-req. jobs have really swelled in the past decade.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
I would rather pay a CEO more than an educational bureaucrat cause you can at least fire the CEO.

eplanit 5y ago

"When an academic wins a Nobel prize, they have achieved a pinnacle of expertise. At which point they often start to wax philosophic, and writing op-eds. They seem to be making a bid to become an elite. Because we all respect and want to associate with elites far more than with experts. Elites far less often lust after becoming experts, because we are often willing to treat elites as if they are experts. For example, when a journalist writes a popular book on science, they are often willing to field science questions when they give a talk on their book. And the rest of us are far more interested in hearing them talk on the subject than the scientists they write about." Not one single sentence of that paragraph is true. When an academic wins a Nobel prize, they have achieved a pinnacle of expertise. No, they've achieved celebrity status (perhaps well-earned by being a top expert). There are those who are experts, but who do not get Nobel prizes. It's not a perfect prize. They seem to be making a bid to become an elite. They don't get the prize because the ask for it or buy it, and the celebrity status comes with it automatically. Some recipients capitalize on it, for sure. I think "the elites" bring them into their circles on their own. Because we all respect and want to associate with elites far more than with experts. No, we all don't. For example, when a journalist writes a popular book on science...the rest of us are far more interested in hearing them talk on the subject than the scientists they write about. I think many (maybe not enough, for sure) don't see 'journalists' as scientific experts. For your Sanjay Guptas it may be true, but he's not a true journalist .

PeterisP 5y ago
It's also worth noting the time delay between winning a Nobel prize and the work for which the prize is received - which generally is 20 or perhaps even 30 years. They were at a pinnacle of expertise decades before winning the Nobel prize, and arguably might not be there anymore when they do get the award - which essentially is the point of transforming from an expert to elite status.
actuallyalys 5y ago
>For example, when a journalist writes a popular book on science...the rest of us are far more interested in hearing them talk on the subject than the scientists they write about. I think many (maybe not enough, for sure) don't see 'journalists' as scientific experts. For your Sanjay Guptas it may be true, but he's not a true journalist . Yeah, this seems dubious to me. For one thing, I think people are plenty interested in pop sci books written by experts—hence all the books by doctors that include "MD" after their name on the cover. Of course, sometimes the MD doesn't indicate expertise in the topic they're writing in, but I suspect a book marketed as "pediatrician and pediatrics researcher Dr. So-and So writes about [childhood health topic]" would probably do better than "Dr. So-and-So, MD, writes about [childhood health topic]." For another thing, there are other plausible explanations than a preference for elites—journalists are more experienced at writing for a general audience and they may have more connections to mass market publishers (rather than academic publishers). I'd also argue communicating science is a separate skill from doing science. I think all scientists have at least a modicum of skill at communicating science to their peers, but journalists can very well have more experience in communicating science to the public than scientists. It's confusing since Hanson acknowledges communication as a kind of expertise when he refers to journalists as "news experts" elsewhere in the post.

bo1024 5y ago

The intriguing part is not that elites get to make decisions instead of experts (that's practically the definition of elite), but that people seem to prefer listening to elites. The panel vs talk example resonated with me. I think a resolution, though, is that real expert knowledge -- things we know for sure -- quickly becomes commoditized, disseminated, and boring. You wouldn't ask a panel how to repair a car engine that's developed a knock. But you might ask them how long until electric vehicles outsell gasoline. So most "interesting" questions, by definition fall outside of anyone's range of expertise (even if expertise can be relevant to answering well). In fact, influenced by Taleb, I wonder if a better model of the world is that almost every question is actually either "every expert knows and agrees on the answer" or "nobody knows and any predictions or arguing about it are almost purely entertainment". Nobody's interested in discussing Type 1 questions, and you might as well listen to elites as experts when it comes to Type 2.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Hmm. Maybe the elites know how to be more entertaining. If you're listening to an answer to a type 2 question, you might as well get entertainment with the answer, because you're not going to get actual knowledge.
qsort 5y ago
> Nobody's interested in discussing Type 1 questions, and you might as well listen to elites as experts when it comes to Type 2. Technical issues matter, though. If experts disagree on something, it doesn't mean they disagree on everything, and this sublety is unfortunately often lost when the discussion moves on to "full elite mode". It's patently obvious on IT/software development/AI subjects, where people who can't write hello world come out of the blue to inform us there's going to be a singluar aipocalypse or whatever it's called now. There definitely exist topics where it's anybody's guess, but my model is that this is - once more - an epiphenomenon of our inability to effectively incorporate proper science and scientific thought in the public debate.
postsantum 5y ago
They prefer to side with people who look more powerful and give them a sense of identity, especially when it comes to contrarian opinions. Nerdy experts certainly don't cut it

deleted 5y ago

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stopnamingnuts 5y ago

Pretty dour commentary on human nature. There's a kernel of something worth considering but sacrifices nuance in favor of a crafted idea. As a member of the described expert class, I'd say we have limitations equal to those of elites. That's not examined.

interlocutor2 5y ago

I read the examples as a different architype. Not elites but communicators. Experts write to be carefully technically correct, standing up to the scrutiny of other experts. Pop-sci or more general communicators write to express the ideas in a fun or relatable way, sometimes mangling them. Just like other mass media, popular = lowest common denominator.

pphysch 5y ago

The author is lumping management & aristocracy into one group and calling it "elites". This sort of unjustified & useless ontologizing is one of the mainstays of the Rationalist crowd. But it sure is fun.

paulpauper 5y ago

Finally, consider that recently I went into clear expert mode to release a formal preprint on grabby aliens, which induced almost no (< 10) comments on this blog or Twitter, in contrast to far more comments when arguable-elites discuss it in panelist/elite mode: Scott Aaronson (205), Scott Alexander (108), and Hacker News (110). People are far more interested in talking with elites in elite mode on most topics, than in talking with the clear relevant experts in expert mode. This can obviously be explained by them having bigger audiences/platforms.

Kronopath 5y ago
Partly that, but I think there are also other explanations. 1: I think Scott Aaronson is a better communicator than Robin Hanson, at least in the posts in question. Having read some of the blog posts that went into the pre-read, and then Scott Aaronson’s summary of it, Aaronson does a better job at summarizing the research, connecting it with our day-to-day lives, and making it more fun to read. It has less detail, but that’s arguably a good thing: I don’t need a huge amount of detail on theoretical models for extraterrestrial civilizations, I don’t have the time or energy for that. It’s interesting, but I don’t want to spend hours today reading multiple different blog posts and an academic paper trying to grok the particulars. (I personally have a pet peeve in that I feel like the typical “style” of academic papers is very bad for communication in general.) 2: WRT Hacker News and /r/SlateStarCodex, people comment there because they want to discuss it among their “tribe”. Wandering onto a stranger’s blog and putting something in the comments can be an anxiety-inducing affair: you don’t know what the people there are like, you don’t what their rules or (sub-)culture is like. You might not fit in, or you might even piss off the author. Meanwhile, I could probably guess pretty accurately what kind of comments are going to show up in any given popular HN story, and how to discuss things in such a way that it would go over well here.
- asimjalis 5y ago
  Good analysis. And maybe the expert vs elite distinction is similar to the distinction between low-level detail vs higher-level summary combined with accessible analogies.

raspasov 5y ago

False dichotomy. Much more useful to think about most things (esp. societal and behavioral) as a spectrum. Very few things are completely black and white.

pessimizer 5y ago
Is this something you can expand on, or just another argument to moderation?
- raspasov 5y ago
  Experts vs Elites are made-up categories. More categories can be arbitrarily created. For example, Experts vs Elites vs Workers. Or Experts vs Elites vs Workers vs Long-term unemployed. I haven't seen solid evidence for splitting the world in such categories. It definitely makes for entertaining demagoguery but not much more. Such categories also completely exclude the concept of time from the analysis. It's like trying to judge a movie from a single random screenshot. I.e. a person might be a worker today, expert in 3 years, and later suffer from depressive symptoms and be chronically unemployed.

netcan 5y ago

There's a certain kind of innocence to this. "Elites" are one half of many popular dichotomies, and the term takes a lot of meaning from whatever it's being compared to. Elite is a morally evocative term, and that tends to surface a users values, and what we find outrageous. Robin associates elite with celebrity, prestige and credit... expertise with a lack of it. Unfairness and dishonesty in how status and prestige are allocated. Personally, I separate large parts of the celebrity aspects from this whole tangle. Celebrity scientists, engineers and such are a great thing. Why should the celebrity sphere only contain socialites, athletes, actors, musicians, billionaires. Something like the nobel prize ceremonially designates someone a celebrity scientist. That's not a terrible thing. Like any other idol, they represent something. Reality is always more complex, but idols embody simple stereotypes that they represent.Watch a small nation bring home a gold in women's judo. Two years later judo is often a thriving sport with many high achievers. Idols are values, and values impacts like this. Doing the same for medicine or physics works the same way. I get that people feel celebrity worship is vapid idolatry, but every society worships stuff... often designated hero types. Subcultures too. Led Zeppelin, Elon Musk, Mother Theressa, etc. Why not worship a scientist, if we're always worshipping somebody anyway?

deleted 5y ago
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mertd 5y ago

Clubhouse in a nutshell

sesm 5y ago

Aren’t diplomacy, management and public speech areas of expertise too?

Animats 5y ago

Now we have "influencers", which are neither experts nor elites, but merely visible. That used to be a tiny niche. Now it's a career path. Angelyne was probably the first to pull this off in modern times. She used to have billboards all over LA, with her name and picture. She became famous for being famous, without performing or accomplishing much. She's on the California recall election ballot right now. Somewhere between a third and three-quarters of kids, depending on survey, now want to be YouTubers when they grow up.

paulpauper 5y ago
they are experts at that which they are influencing Someone who does YouTube comedy for a living is probably an expert at both comedy and youtube.

wolverine876 5y ago

The author throws away their own and our power - it's up to you (and me) to evaluate elites and experts and to influence your community and decide what happens there. All elites and experts can do is attempt to persuade other people, but it's really up to those other people. There are endless examples of the public ignoring the elites and experts. > This also helps explain why artists are said to “contribute to important conversations” by making documentaries, etc. that express “emotional truths.” They present themselves as qualifying elites by virtue of their superior art abilities. Artists are 'experts' in observing, conceiving, and expressing the world that is and the world that isn't. Many experts in their own domains overlook the real issue, misunderstand it, have failures of imagination, and fail to express themselves effectively.

User23 5y ago
> All elites and experts can do is attempt to persuade other people Experts rarely persuade anyone, and when they do it's usually another expert in the same field. So much for expertise. Meanwhile, being successful at persuasion is one of the defining characteristics of high social status. Napoleon was dead broke when he escaped from Elba, but by the time he made it to Paris virtually the entire French army was marching with him. It's hard to be more elite than being a beloved emperor who persuades the usurping king's army to join him. Another way you can tell social status is mate selection. For example, Elon Musk is clearly not just rich, but socially elite. Consider the difference between the women he is with compared to the obvious wildly rich but low sociosexual status nerds like Zuckerberg.
SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
I don't think he means to claim that we don't have an active role in this. The argument is that when you're trying to listen to the experts, you have to be careful, because it's easy to end up listening only to elites who claim to represent the experts.

lamontcg 5y ago

ironic that this is published on a blog called "overcoming bias".

mybrid 5y ago

I'd contrast this by watching a season of HBO's "Entourage". I find it interesting that actors who are those with the least expertise and least value of conversation have talent agents and publicists whereas the experts have little to no talent agents or publicists. Why not just hire a publicist to write popular versions of the technical stuff that the expert feels accurately portray the technical innards? The ability to communicate with the masses is talent independent of other expertise. One can be talented in both that's what it is, two talents. Finally, America's corruption right now is off the charts. One cannot take seriously any critique of America's elite without factoring in the huge amount of influence corruption is having at all levels of elitism in this country. So I couldn't take this seriously. America is weird.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
What corruption exists in the US? Short of politicians and lobbyists (since thats obvious), where else does it occur? As far as I'm concerned, family politics and inheritances are not corrupt.

mybrid 5y ago

Side note; Disqus has a terrible reputation for selling user data. https://victorzhou.com/blog/replacing-disqus/ https://victorzhou.com/blog/replacing-disqus/ I tend to avoid any site that uses it.

motohagiography 5y ago

I'd posit that elites are just the objects of mimetic desire, where experts have expertise, they're almost completely unrelated outside narrow fields. Elites are the people you want to be like, and sometimes who we envy as a result.

cgrealy 5y ago

> As we saw early in the pandemic, the elites are always visibly chattering among themselves about the topics of the day, and when they form a new opinion, the experts usually quickly cave to agree with them, and try to pretend they agreed all along. My experience was the opposite in most of the world, where experts recommended lockdowns and masks and most political "elites" (especially in the US and UK) ignoring that to the chagrin of the experts.

etangent 5y ago
Cases when experts propose something and then elites disagree with the experts are not surprising. It is the default state of affairs everywhere in the world. That's a "dog bites man" situation---essentially a non-story. What is really surprising (and revealing) is when elites do propose something and then experts follow along even though it runs against their previous opinion from just a week ago. For a vivid example: most experts before the pandemic agreed that masks help limit spread of respiratory diseases, yet nevertheless in the very first few weeks of the pandemic most of them followed along with the completely unscientific claim that masks do not help and that everyone should simply wash their hands instead. Likewise, we had expert voices making sophisticated arguments that shutting down international travel would do nothing to limit spread of the virus---a claim that a middle-schooler would call out as largely bullshit.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  I suspect that by the time anybody suggested shutting down international travel (at least in the US), it was far too late to make a difference. The virus was already widespread, with no hope of containing it.
dexen 5y ago
What you describe is matter of selection bias: in fields as crowded as public health and medicine, experts voice all sorts of advice, citing all kinds of research, and often contradicting each other. At the end of the day, we regular citizens usually hear from those experts that got their voices amplified by operators of platforms (journalism, political institutions, etc.). In Robin's terms, the elites choose from the crowd of experts those that they like the advice the best.

rendall 5y ago

> Consider news articles versus columnists. The news articles are written by news experts, in full expert mode. I read much more skeptically from this point on. It almost seems the motivation for the entire post is due to the lack of reaction to his "grabby aliens" post