When It Comes to Expertise, You Can Always Fight a Guerilla War
You know how conservatives always have those big sign-on letters, listing X number of experts who disagree with evolution, or don’t think global warming is human caused?
You know you know what I mean. You know it drives you completely crazy.
In this post, I want to tell you why it works. To do so, I’m going to build on a recent article I did in The American Prospect, explaining how the Democratic Party in the U.S. today has become the chosen party of academics and experts—but that conservatives have more than enough allied experts of their own to keep it…interesting.
Here’s one way to describe the basic statistics, which simultaneously reflect both the broad expansion of higher education and also a leftward migration of academia and expertise:
The Democratic Party has become the chosen party of what you might call “empirical professionals” and Americans with advanced degrees. According to research [the University of British Columbia’s Neil] Gross conducted with Ethan Fosse of Harvard University and Jeremy Freese of Northwestern University, nearly 15 percent of U.S. liberals now hold one, more than double the percentage that did in the 1970s. The percentage of moderates and conservatives with advanced degrees has also increased but lags far behind the saturation levels of expertise among liberals. Indeed, conservatives are about where liberals were back in the 1970s.
Forget for the moment why things are this way. Let’s just ponder the consequences.
Experts are well educated people. They’re confident, they know how to do research, they know how to cite sources and argue. So what happens when you have a politicized gap with more experts on one side than the other?
First, the experts on both sides argue with each other—in print, on tv, in their own minds, or wherever—and both sides become more convinced they’re right. The theory of motivated reasoning predicts that the sophisticated are capable of becoming more extreme and polarized, thanks to both their confidence and also their competence. They’re better at reinforcing their own views.
Second, for the non-experts out there, whatever side you’re on, it’s easy in this situation to find an expert who supports what you believe. And indeed, for the very same basic psychological reason, you’re not only more likely to find an expert who agrees with you than one that doesn’t (due to confirmation bias), but also to believe that person the person who agrees with you is a real expert, whereas the one who disagrees with you is a fake one. This was shown in a recent, amazing study by Dan Kahan at Yale, in which people with different values tended to discredit the expertise of experts who were depicted as supporting positions that were contrary to their values.
Third, when all of this plays out in the media—at least insofar as it’s a typical expert-versus-expert on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand show—you can expect the public to leave feeling confused about who’s right and what’s true. Again, there’s research on this. I’ve blogged about it here. The Ohio State University communications professor Raymond Pingree has shown that “passive” media coverage, where reporters don’t take sides on who’s right about the facts, leaves media consumers less sure that the truth is “out there” somewhere that they can actually grasp it.
So we have a situation in which our experts get polarized, while everybody else either finds their own convenient expert or just thinks the experts don’t really know anything (or there’s no real way to find out what they know). The result? Pretty negative, any way you look at it.
But consider the game theory of all this: If some issue is going against you, and if there’s a vastness of expertise or expert consensus aligned against you, why not create an expertise war? After all, there are plenty of experts around. Some are bound to still agree with you.
At least you can keep it just about even.
What can we do about this? Well, a complete change in the way the media works would help. Don’t hold your breath.
Court cases can sometimes work, too. For evolution, and for same sex parenting, judges have stepped in and affirmed where the expert consensus actually lies.
When all else fails, at least there’s humor. Let me end with a quotation from my recent article:
For an amusing example of [the] expertise imbalance, consider Project Steve. This is a ploy by the pro-evolution National Center for Science Education to undermine conservative sign-on letters boasting large numbers of “experts” who question the theory of evolution. Project Steve goes one better—it finds scientists named Steve who support evolution. To date, over a thousand Steves have signed on—and, as NCSE boasts, Steves constitute only about 1 percent of scientists.
So, yeah—we liberals have lots of high-caliber experts. And a lot of good it is doing us.
Um... Chris... It works for
Um... Chris...
It works for exactly the same reason that many people accepted the fabled Concensus.
The fact that the "Concensus" was fabricated meant little to most people. They simple saw the headline and accepted it.
If they ever took the time to investigate, they would find:
the Concensus was an Extreme Exageration.
the 97 percent of Scientists Myth was just that
And the list of Dissenting Scientists are verifiable.
Few people ever take the time however and that is how this scam has lasted so long.
Scientific Truth is not determined by how many “experts” you hav
The left my have plenty of experts, but it has no expertise.
The typical consensus argument from the left always begins this way. It starts by stating that all of the real experts are on the left. Any experts on the right are fake experts. They aren’t scientists, and if they are, they’re not climate scientists, and if they are, they’re not published, and if they are, they’re took Exxon money 20 years ago, so their obviously liars.
If the public isn’t satisfied counting lab-coats, they’re told to count societies. The official position of prestigious scientific organizations may support the left. But even if its really just the leadership, and a huge portion of the membership is vocally opposed, we don’t’ hear it.
When counting scientists and counting lab coats aren’t enough, we’re told to count each other. Public opinion polls are show to prove how much the public wants to be capped and taxed to show their moral superiority over those who doubt the consensus.
In all this counting, we the public are never asked to consider the science itself. We are given the false choice of belief. Irrationally, we are told that we are qualified to accept the science, but we are not qualified to deny it.
We live in a society that values the weight of words over the weight of individuals. The public has neither the time nor the inclination to listen to all of the speakers on any given subject.
Scientific Truth is not determined by how many “experts” you can put in a line.
Conservatives don't "agree" with evolution? When?
"You know how conservatives always have those big sign-on letters, listing X number of experts who disagree with evolution, or don’t think global warming is human caused?"
Yeah, those stupid conservatives -- I bet they don't even know the difference between a "guerilla" and a "gorilla".
BTW, Unlike the theory of evolution, the HYPOTHESIS of anthropogenic global warming does not meet the requirments to be called a valid scientific theory, since it is an unfalsifiable claim.
Not that that will ever stop you from conflating the two.
Chris isn't interested in Community Feedback
He wrote this on his own blog in response to his article here:
"Scientific Truth is not determined by how many “experts” you can put in a line.
And definitely not determined by how many non-experts can make up critiques on the internet."
Oh cmon Chris. The
Oh cmon Chris. The conservatives have the bible belt to draw on & the confederate states for expertise, thats not fair.
"The bible & baby jesus tells me so" OR
"My shotgurn says yer wrong".
What about Bjorn Lomborg or Chris Monckton, or Anthony Watts or Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh?.......oh thats right, sorry forgot they arent scientists....... At least they have more say than people that know what they are doing & that's got to be a good thing...right?
The "Steve" thing is
The "Steve" thing is interesting. It shows that people named Steve are brave enough to stand up for what they believe as long as they are backed up by a sufficiently overwhelming number of other Steves. By signing on they risk nothing at all professionally, and they demonstrate that any latent spirituality they may once have had has been effectively scrubbed out. Way to go, brave Steve.
People are followers. Religious and non religious alike. People are putty. Even scientists named Steve are mostly just copies of the next guy.