More on Intellectual Authority
Most of the time, if you no longer trust the experts, you've started trusting someone's uncle.
I was very pleased to see Sam Harris take up the subject of intellectual authority. Partial transcript below.
Okay, and now for an important topic on which I appear to have offended many, many people, about which many of these offended people appear profoundly confused. I think this is somewhere near the center of our most pressing cultural problems, especially the shattering of our information landscape, and the resulting hyperpolarization of our politics. The result of this, especially on the right, is an increasingly conspiratorial view of the world. Rather than recognize that bad outcomes are often due to ignorance or incompetence, people on the right seem to see malevolent competence and coordination everywhere. This shattering is also fueling widespread contempt for institutions. Needless to say, any response to this contempt from the institutions themselves tends to be dismissed as just more sinister machinations on the part of the elites. Now, some of this populist backlash is understandable, but increasingly this seems like a cultural death spiral to me. Our institutions simply must regain public trust. The question is how can they do that?
At the core of this problem lurks a fundamental question about the nature of intellectual authority. When do we rely on it and when are we right to ignore it or even repudiate it? Everyone knows that you shouldn't argue from authority. You can't say, “What I'm saying is true because I am saying it” or “it's true because Einstein said it” or “because it's been published in a prestigious journal.” If a theory is true or a fact is really a fact, it is so independent of the identity of the person adducing it. Consequently, no sane expert ever really argues from authority. What actually happens is something that is easily mistaken for this, which is that people often rely on authority as a proxy for explaining or even understanding why something is true.
It's a little like using money as a medium of exchange, rather than hauling around valuable objects or commodities. It's easier to carry dirty paper in your pocket than a barrel of oil or a bushel of wheat. In the same way, it's easier to say or to think that gravity is identical to the curvature of spacetime because Einstein proved it than it is to really understand the general theory of relativity. It's a shortcut that's necessary for just about everyone most of the time. The crucial point is that there is a difference between rejecting any argument from authority and rejecting the value or reality of authority itself.
For instance, I often speak with physicists on this podcast, and when I do, it is appropriate for me to assume that they know their field better than I do. After all, that is what specialization is. If I spent as much time studying physics as a professional physicist and proved competent at that task, I would be a physicist. And when talking to a physicist, it is important for me to understand that I'm not one. Of course, this is true for any other area of specialization. If I'm talking to Siddhartha Mukherjee about cancer, it is only decent and sane for me to acknowledge, if merely tacitly by asking questions and listening to the answers, that he, being a celebrated oncologist, knows more about cancer than I do.
There simply is such a thing as expertise, and to not acknowledge this is just idiotic. And to move through life not acknowledging it is to turn the whole world into a theater of potential embarrassment.
Relying on authority can produce errors, of course, in the same way that some of the money in your wallet could prove to be counterfeit. But not relying on it, shunning it, just "doing one's own research," is guaranteed to produce more errors, at least in the aggregate. After all, what is one doing when one is "doing one's own research," if not seeking out what the best authorities have to say on a given topic? What the phrase "doing your own research" usually refers to are the efforts that people make to sort through information, mostly online, when they no longer trust what most mainstream experts have to say.
Usually what this means is that they have gone in search of other voices that are telling them what they want to hear, or perhaps what they don't want to hear, but is now coming with a compelling, conspiratorial, or contrarian slant. You don't trust what the most respected doctors have to say, because you think they've all been captured by big pharma, perhaps, so you find a guy in Tijuana who says he can cure your cancer. You don't trust what the Mayo Clinic says about vaccines, and now you're afraid to get your kids vaccinated, because you've listened to 14 hours of RFK, Jr. on podcasts, and now you've started trusting him as, what, a new authority.
We can't break free of the circle of authority. Of course, I'm not denying that it's possible to do truly original research, where you become the new authority, but that is not what we're talking about here. Doing one's own research almost never entails running the relevant experiments in virology oneself, or searching the Soviet archives oneself, or translating a speech from Arabic oneself, or interviewing the long-dead politician oneself. Most of the time, we simply have to trust that other people did their work responsibly, that their data isn't fabricated, that they didn't devote their entire careers to perpetrating an elaborate hoax. Again, there are exceptions, but they are simply not relevant most of the time. That is what it means to be an exception. Most of the time, if you no longer trust the experts, you've started trusting someone's uncle.