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> there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work I'm sceptic

> there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work I'm sceptical of that. I tend to suspect that Michael Gove's "the people have had enough of experts" thing was _kind_ of correct; there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout, at least, the West at the moment. (I don't think this is quite the same as traditional anti-intellectualism; it seems to be almost an active view that it is better that people in authority do not know how to do their job.)

psychoslave 2y ago
Expertise can be of great value, but no-one is an expert on every matter and the rest. And expertise don’t make anyone free of committing errors, or to be drawn in a corruption schemes. We can have a thorough and deep expertise on some technical domain, and yet lake the sagacity and humility to judge where it won’t put us in better position than someone else dealing with an issue on the topic in a context the other person is already deeply acquainted with, while we are completely unaware of its many specificity. On the other hand of course someone tightly coupled with a particular situation might easily miss some bigger picture that a relevant expertise could unlock.
MrVandemar 2y ago
>there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout Probably because the experts are telling them that if they want a future, everyone is going to have to compromise their current lifestyle. Not a popular message. People will always be sceptical and hostile towards people who say "you can't have X". People are always happy to believe people who say "Vote for me and you have as much X as you want!"
- kuschku 2y ago
  Tbh, the Matrix wasn't far off with the portrayal of Cypher. They just didn't expect half of the population to prefer the comfortable lie over the inconvenient truth.
- jajko 2y ago
  > "you can't have X" More like 'you can't have X anymore' or 'only rich can have X' that brings another level of resentment and emotional kneejerk reactions. The problem is, if 'less smart' need to be baby-sitted through every single unpopular but necessary decision, this is a failure of democracy. Sure normal democracy self-corrects over time, but not when its pushed into some form of dictatorship where the only correction mechanism is death of those in power. That's why all researchers into immortality should be all locked up permanently in prison or to be sure shot in the head right now, however terrible and drastic it sounds. The tyranny that this will bring on mankind will make any absolutely terrible period from the past look like a paradise, and have 0 doubts all dictators ever would gladly scorch whole Earth just to achieve it.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    > That's why all researchers into immortality should be all locked up permanently in prison or to be sure shot in the head right now ... I mean, you could just ban that sort of research; slightly less extreme. Though, frankly, I wouldn't bother; it appears highly unlikely to get anywhere anytime soon.
graemep 2y ago
Gove was right. The problem is that experts no longer have to explain or justify themselves or explain the level of evidence behind their opinions. Expertise has also been politicised. Experts are picked who give the prior decided opinions, and those who have the wrong opinion are got rid of (e.g. Professor David Nutt). Finally Gove was speaking in the context of Brexit, and arguing that it ultimately a question of national identity. DO people identify as British or European? I agree - it is more like whether people in Northern Ireland want to be part of the UK or the Irish Republic, or maybe Scottish independence, than anything else in British politics. lots of parallels around the rest of the world. Covid policy had multiple examples of this, and of not consulting experts on a sufficiently wide range of subjects. A lot of evidence based policy is like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gMcZic1d4U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gMcZic1d4U
- dbspin 2y ago
  Not to politicise this discussion, but the country is called 'The Republic of Ireland'. The phrase 'the Irish Republic' references the 1916 Easter proclamation, and has specific political and even colonial implications in Ireland. It's frequently used on BBC news, but never in Ireland where it would have a similar connotation to 'the free state' or other radical republican delegitimisations of the Irish state.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    So, to confuse the issue, the country is officially called Ireland (it's in the constitution!), and that is the name normally used in Ireland and in Europe. The UK government officially referred to Ireland as the Republic of Ireland until 1998 (it now calls it Ireland) and as a result people in the UK often call it the Republic of Ireland. People calling it the Irish Republic usually have an agenda in doing so, yeah. ED: > Not to politicise this discussion I mean, this is on a thread about the Nazis; I think you don't need to worry too much about further politicising it :)
    - dbspin 2y ago
      Right you are. Also, if you're Rob Synnott I'm pretty sure I remember you from back in the early blogging / podcast days. Hope you're well.
jdcasale 2y ago
Fwiw, my experience from growing up in deep red America was that anti-intellectualism was staggeringly strong there. People would actually define their beliefs in opposition to those of people they perceived to be 'smart'. The way that I always understood this was that if they had a disagreement with someone 'smarter' than them, and they operated in good faith, they would lose ~98% of the time. This doesn't feel good. It makes smart people threatening -- it breeds resentment toward them. However, if you have a roomful of people who define their position in opposition to the 'smart' person, your beliefs are the ones that matter, regardless of what the truth is, so you get to feel like you've won the argument. Most arguments are not consequential, so this practice doesn't really cause meaningful short-term harm so there's no negative feedback. Over the long-term, this herd mentality is how people learn to navigate the world, and you end up with a giant mess.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  I think the current thing is a little bit different, though. It has gone from "academics are bad" to "anyone who knows how to do a thing is unsuitable to do that thing", which is a far more extreme viewpoint.
  - jdcasale 2y ago
    I got a little carried away with this response and it's a little off-topic, but I figured it might be worth posting anyway. I think this has to do with the nonlinear growth in the human-facing complexity of the world over the past 30 years. Humans aren't getting more intelligent (they may not be getting dumber either, but at the very least, the hardware is the same), but the complexity of the world that we have to engage with has undergone accelerating growth for most of my lifetime. The fraction of this complexity that is exposed to 'normal' people has also grown significantly over that period of time with the 24-hour news cycle, social media, mobile internet, etc. It's obvious that at some point in this trend any given person will start running into issues with the world that are above their complexity ceiling. If this event is rare, we shrug it off and move on with our day. If this becomes commonplace, we start to drown in that complexity and desperately cling to sources of perceived clarity, because it's fucking terrifying to be surrounded by a world that you don't understand. The thing that the right has done really well and that the left has generally failed to do in my lifetime is to identify sources of complexity and provide appealing clarity around them. This clarity is necessarily an approximation of the truth, but we NEED simple answers that make the world less scary. People also, as a general rule, don't like to be lectured or told that they are part of the problem -- the right never foists any blame upon the people it's targeting. In my lifetime, the left has pretty consistently fought amongst ourselves over which inaccuracies are allowable or just when we attempt to create simplifying approximations. Instead of providing a unified, simplifying vision for any given topic, the messaging gives several conflicting accounts that make it easy to see the cracks in each argument, and often serve to make the problem worse. If you're competing with another source of information that is simple, clear, and makes people feel good (or at least like they are good), you will always lose if you do not also achieve those three things. In the vacuum created by a lack of simple, blameless, intuitive messaging from an (arguably) well-meaning left-leaning establishment, the intuitive (though generally wrong and often cruel) explanations offered by the right have found huge support and adoption by people who need someone to help them understand the world. Because both messages are approximations of the truth (and thus sources of verifiable inaccuracies) people just choose the one that makes them feel better. tldr I think we've hit a point where: - The world is too complex for many people to independently navigate - People need rely on simplifying approximations of the world - Media provides these approximations, often in bad faith - Sources of credibility or expertise often provide these approximation in good faith, but can't agree on which approximations are the 'right' ones - Good faith messaging often either fails to simplify or makes people feel bad/guilty - People are sick of feeling bad or guilty - People associate expertise with being scolded over things that don't feel fair or fully accurate to them Thus people often reject expertise out of principle, and just believe whatever Fox News tells them because it feels better. ALSO: People who believe the 'right' things are often pretty shitty to people who don't (it goes both ways, but the other direction doesn't matter for this post). I've been guilty of this. This just further galvanizes the association between expertise or the 'right' ideas/people and feelings of resentment/guilt/shame for these folks. They may not understand what you said, but the do understand that you were talking down to them, and they hate you for that.
elif 2y ago
The anti mask, anti vax, anti chromosomal expression, anti 'tariffs are taxes' are beyond "anti-expert" These positions are flatly anti-base-reality. If you want to frame them in terms of authority rejection, you could call them anti-first graders
- concordDance 2y ago
  > anti chromosomal expression Genuinely couldn't figure out what this is a euphamism for.
- throw10920 2y ago
  > anti chromosomal expression What's this? I've literally never heard this phrase before in my life.
throw0101a 2y ago
> there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout, at least, the West at the moment. Anti-intellectualism in the US goes back decades (if not centuries): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_American_Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ... The first two US colonies were Jamestown (looking for El Dorado North; gold; riches) and Plymouth (religious society): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasyland:_How_America_Went_Haywire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasyland:_How_America_Went_... * https://www.kurtandersen.com/fantasyland https://www.kurtandersen.com/fantasyland The magical thinking of those two are the seeds of US society today and all the fruits (good and bad) can probably be linked to the ideas of one of the two.
- __egb__ 2y ago
  I’m a huge fan of Asimov. Years ago I bought a back issue of the Newsweek that this was originally published in, framed it, and still have it hanging in my office: https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_C...
  - throw0101b 2y ago
    > There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”. See also book by Tom Nichols (a now-retired professor from U.S. Naval War College): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise
    - DoctorOetker 2y ago
      > “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge” I think a more apt description is the misconception that democracy supposedly means everybody gets their "equal proper timeshare of being considered correct".
taurknaut 2y ago
I see this as very different from "i'm eating ivermectin because bigpharma wants me to buy their vaccines" or whatever it is people say. There are certainly fascism experts out there, but the one thing that I've noticed again and again is that they emphasize how effective fascism is at changing forms and tactics. Today, most of the countries we refer to as authoritarian or fascist are formally liberal democracies (by which I mean republics). And critically, many of the core symptoms—militarization of police, violent suppression of protests, demonization of outgroups (muslims, immigrants), worship of the military, disenfranchisement of voting rights—long predate Trump's political rise. Hell, we were an apartheid state in living memory, and the anticommunist propaganda here truly does rival that of fascist countries (albeit mostly an aspect of the past at thus point in terms of overt propaganda). To many Americans, fascism might seem natural and might feel like home, so an expert saying "this is fascism now" is going to get a very very wide range of reactions. And even to educated, well-meaning americans, we have a really nasty habit of sweeping our evil deeds under the rug and forgetting what we are capable of. If Trump were to move forward with mass deportations, it wouldn't be the first time, or the second time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback is one particularly nastily named example. Many "experts" on tv don't read history and are oblivious to how close to fascism we already are. It's also worth remembering that Hitler was a huge fan of America. Liebensraum was inspired by manifest destiny. We built this country on extreme violence, arguably to a unique degree (along with other anglo colonies). That muscle doesn't just go away. We've really only been a "liberal democracy" for about sixty years now. So yea, I don't think you can write this off as anti-intellectualism or anti-expert, this is just who we are as a people.
- bsenftner 2y ago
  > this is just who we are as a people. I do not believe that. I believe this situation is engineered, and we have some very long game playing manipulators being very successful today. Society engineering is real, and there are many players active in that game.
  - taurknaut 2y ago
    Societal engineering is not mutually exclusive with either confusion over what fascism is nor the many fascist traits that have always been in this country. But yes, I think I would probably just call the societal engineering "for-profit media". Manufacturing Consent should be read by every adult in this country.
bsenftner 2y ago
A huge part of that is the lack of any effective communications education at all for the general population. Few realize that effective communications training is also ordered and logical thinking training. People with no communications training have disorganized emotional reasoning, unless something else formal comes along such as philosophy, mathematics or software, but then you get a technical specialist that cannot explain themselves nor their work to anyone other than a same education peer - exactly our current situation.

psychoslave 2y ago

Expertise can be of great value, but no-one is an expert on every matter and the rest. And expertise don’t make anyone free of committing errors, or to be drawn in a corruption schemes. We can have a thorough and deep expertise on some technical domain, and yet lake the sagacity and humility to judge where it won’t put us in better position than someone else dealing with an issue on the topic in a context the other person is already deeply acquainted with, while we are completely unaware of its many specificity. On the other hand of course someone tightly coupled with a particular situation might easily miss some bigger picture that a relevant expertise could unlock.

MrVandemar 2y ago

>there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout Probably because the experts are telling them that if they want a future, everyone is going to have to compromise their current lifestyle. Not a popular message. People will always be sceptical and hostile towards people who say "you can't have X". People are always happy to believe people who say "Vote for me and you have as much X as you want!"

kuschku 2y ago
Tbh, the Matrix wasn't far off with the portrayal of Cypher. They just didn't expect half of the population to prefer the comfortable lie over the inconvenient truth.
jajko 2y ago
> "you can't have X" More like 'you can't have X anymore' or 'only rich can have X' that brings another level of resentment and emotional kneejerk reactions. The problem is, if 'less smart' need to be baby-sitted through every single unpopular but necessary decision, this is a failure of democracy. Sure normal democracy self-corrects over time, but not when its pushed into some form of dictatorship where the only correction mechanism is death of those in power. That's why all researchers into immortality should be all locked up permanently in prison or to be sure shot in the head right now, however terrible and drastic it sounds. The tyranny that this will bring on mankind will make any absolutely terrible period from the past look like a paradise, and have 0 doubts all dictators ever would gladly scorch whole Earth just to achieve it.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > That's why all researchers into immortality should be all locked up permanently in prison or to be sure shot in the head right now ... I mean, you could just ban that sort of research; slightly less extreme. Though, frankly, I wouldn't bother; it appears highly unlikely to get anywhere anytime soon.

graemep 2y ago

Gove was right. The problem is that experts no longer have to explain or justify themselves or explain the level of evidence behind their opinions. Expertise has also been politicised. Experts are picked who give the prior decided opinions, and those who have the wrong opinion are got rid of (e.g. Professor David Nutt). Finally Gove was speaking in the context of Brexit, and arguing that it ultimately a question of national identity. DO people identify as British or European? I agree - it is more like whether people in Northern Ireland want to be part of the UK or the Irish Republic, or maybe Scottish independence, than anything else in British politics. lots of parallels around the rest of the world. Covid policy had multiple examples of this, and of not consulting experts on a sufficiently wide range of subjects. A lot of evidence based policy is like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gMcZic1d4U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gMcZic1d4U

dbspin 2y ago
Not to politicise this discussion, but the country is called 'The Republic of Ireland'. The phrase 'the Irish Republic' references the 1916 Easter proclamation, and has specific political and even colonial implications in Ireland. It's frequently used on BBC news, but never in Ireland where it would have a similar connotation to 'the free state' or other radical republican delegitimisations of the Irish state.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  So, to confuse the issue, the country is officially called Ireland (it's in the constitution!), and that is the name normally used in Ireland and in Europe. The UK government officially referred to Ireland as the Republic of Ireland until 1998 (it now calls it Ireland) and as a result people in the UK often call it the Republic of Ireland. People calling it the Irish Republic usually have an agenda in doing so, yeah. ED: > Not to politicise this discussion I mean, this is on a thread about the Nazis; I think you don't need to worry too much about further politicising it :)
  - dbspin 2y ago
    Right you are. Also, if you're Rob Synnott I'm pretty sure I remember you from back in the early blogging / podcast days. Hope you're well.

jdcasale 2y ago

Fwiw, my experience from growing up in deep red America was that anti-intellectualism was staggeringly strong there. People would actually define their beliefs in opposition to those of people they perceived to be 'smart'. The way that I always understood this was that if they had a disagreement with someone 'smarter' than them, and they operated in good faith, they would lose ~98% of the time. This doesn't feel good. It makes smart people threatening -- it breeds resentment toward them. However, if you have a roomful of people who define their position in opposition to the 'smart' person, your beliefs are the ones that matter, regardless of what the truth is, so you get to feel like you've won the argument. Most arguments are not consequential, so this practice doesn't really cause meaningful short-term harm so there's no negative feedback. Over the long-term, this herd mentality is how people learn to navigate the world, and you end up with a giant mess.

rsynnott 2y ago
I think the current thing is a little bit different, though. It has gone from "academics are bad" to "anyone who knows how to do a thing is unsuitable to do that thing", which is a far more extreme viewpoint.
- jdcasale 2y ago
  I got a little carried away with this response and it's a little off-topic, but I figured it might be worth posting anyway. I think this has to do with the nonlinear growth in the human-facing complexity of the world over the past 30 years. Humans aren't getting more intelligent (they may not be getting dumber either, but at the very least, the hardware is the same), but the complexity of the world that we have to engage with has undergone accelerating growth for most of my lifetime. The fraction of this complexity that is exposed to 'normal' people has also grown significantly over that period of time with the 24-hour news cycle, social media, mobile internet, etc. It's obvious that at some point in this trend any given person will start running into issues with the world that are above their complexity ceiling. If this event is rare, we shrug it off and move on with our day. If this becomes commonplace, we start to drown in that complexity and desperately cling to sources of perceived clarity, because it's fucking terrifying to be surrounded by a world that you don't understand. The thing that the right has done really well and that the left has generally failed to do in my lifetime is to identify sources of complexity and provide appealing clarity around them. This clarity is necessarily an approximation of the truth, but we NEED simple answers that make the world less scary. People also, as a general rule, don't like to be lectured or told that they are part of the problem -- the right never foists any blame upon the people it's targeting. In my lifetime, the left has pretty consistently fought amongst ourselves over which inaccuracies are allowable or just when we attempt to create simplifying approximations. Instead of providing a unified, simplifying vision for any given topic, the messaging gives several conflicting accounts that make it easy to see the cracks in each argument, and often serve to make the problem worse. If you're competing with another source of information that is simple, clear, and makes people feel good (or at least like they are good), you will always lose if you do not also achieve those three things. In the vacuum created by a lack of simple, blameless, intuitive messaging from an (arguably) well-meaning left-leaning establishment, the intuitive (though generally wrong and often cruel) explanations offered by the right have found huge support and adoption by people who need someone to help them understand the world. Because both messages are approximations of the truth (and thus sources of verifiable inaccuracies) people just choose the one that makes them feel better. tldr I think we've hit a point where: - The world is too complex for many people to independently navigate - People need rely on simplifying approximations of the world - Media provides these approximations, often in bad faith - Sources of credibility or expertise often provide these approximation in good faith, but can't agree on which approximations are the 'right' ones - Good faith messaging often either fails to simplify or makes people feel bad/guilty - People are sick of feeling bad or guilty - People associate expertise with being scolded over things that don't feel fair or fully accurate to them Thus people often reject expertise out of principle, and just believe whatever Fox News tells them because it feels better. ALSO: People who believe the 'right' things are often pretty shitty to people who don't (it goes both ways, but the other direction doesn't matter for this post). I've been guilty of this. This just further galvanizes the association between expertise or the 'right' ideas/people and feelings of resentment/guilt/shame for these folks. They may not understand what you said, but the do understand that you were talking down to them, and they hate you for that.

elif 2y ago

The anti mask, anti vax, anti chromosomal expression, anti 'tariffs are taxes' are beyond "anti-expert" These positions are flatly anti-base-reality. If you want to frame them in terms of authority rejection, you could call them anti-first graders

concordDance 2y ago
> anti chromosomal expression Genuinely couldn't figure out what this is a euphamism for.
throw10920 2y ago
> anti chromosomal expression What's this? I've literally never heard this phrase before in my life.

throw0101a 2y ago

> there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout, at least, the West at the moment. Anti-intellectualism in the US goes back decades (if not centuries): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_American_Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ... The first two US colonies were Jamestown (looking for El Dorado North; gold; riches) and Plymouth (religious society): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasyland:_How_America_Went_Haywire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasyland:_How_America_Went_... * https://www.kurtandersen.com/fantasyland https://www.kurtandersen.com/fantasyland The magical thinking of those two are the seeds of US society today and all the fruits (good and bad) can probably be linked to the ideas of one of the two.

__egb__ 2y ago
I’m a huge fan of Asimov. Years ago I bought a back issue of the Newsweek that this was originally published in, framed it, and still have it hanging in my office: https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_C...
- throw0101b 2y ago
  > There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”. See also book by Tom Nichols (a now-retired professor from U.S. Naval War College): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise
  - DoctorOetker 2y ago
    > “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge” I think a more apt description is the misconception that democracy supposedly means everybody gets their "equal proper timeshare of being considered correct".

taurknaut 2y ago

I see this as very different from "i'm eating ivermectin because bigpharma wants me to buy their vaccines" or whatever it is people say. There are certainly fascism experts out there, but the one thing that I've noticed again and again is that they emphasize how effective fascism is at changing forms and tactics. Today, most of the countries we refer to as authoritarian or fascist are formally liberal democracies (by which I mean republics). And critically, many of the core symptoms—militarization of police, violent suppression of protests, demonization of outgroups (muslims, immigrants), worship of the military, disenfranchisement of voting rights—long predate Trump's political rise. Hell, we were an apartheid state in living memory, and the anticommunist propaganda here truly does rival that of fascist countries (albeit mostly an aspect of the past at thus point in terms of overt propaganda). To many Americans, fascism might seem natural and might feel like home, so an expert saying "this is fascism now" is going to get a very very wide range of reactions. And even to educated, well-meaning americans, we have a really nasty habit of sweeping our evil deeds under the rug and forgetting what we are capable of. If Trump were to move forward with mass deportations, it wouldn't be the first time, or the second time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback is one particularly nastily named example. Many "experts" on tv don't read history and are oblivious to how close to fascism we already are. It's also worth remembering that Hitler was a huge fan of America. Liebensraum was inspired by manifest destiny. We built this country on extreme violence, arguably to a unique degree (along with other anglo colonies). That muscle doesn't just go away. We've really only been a "liberal democracy" for about sixty years now. So yea, I don't think you can write this off as anti-intellectualism or anti-expert, this is just who we are as a people.

bsenftner 2y ago
> this is just who we are as a people. I do not believe that. I believe this situation is engineered, and we have some very long game playing manipulators being very successful today. Society engineering is real, and there are many players active in that game.
- taurknaut 2y ago
  Societal engineering is not mutually exclusive with either confusion over what fascism is nor the many fascist traits that have always been in this country. But yes, I think I would probably just call the societal engineering "for-profit media". Manufacturing Consent should be read by every adult in this country.

bsenftner 2y ago

A huge part of that is the lack of any effective communications education at all for the general population. Few realize that effective communications training is also ordered and logical thinking training. People with no communications training have disorganized emotional reasoning, unless something else formal comes along such as philosophy, mathematics or software, but then you get a technical specialist that cannot explain themselves nor their work to anyone other than a same education peer - exactly our current situation.