How to Think About Those who Tell us What to Think
Reading time: 4 minutes
Punditman says…
Last year, there was a viral video going around telling us how to figure out if we’re on the right side of an issue. Heaven forbid if we’re not!
Maybe if the education system emphasized critical thinking skills rather than rote learning geared to standardized testing — and the populace was overflowing with quasi-Socrates’s enjoying enlightened conversations rather than people hurling insults at each other online — then such videos would not be needed.
In any case, the narrator begins by making some solid points about the importance of nuance. Good start, I thought. We need more nuance in these polarized times.
He then neatly divides people into two camps: one side sane, smart, nice and full of experts; the other side insane, dumb, angry and full of charlatans and Nazis. Where’s that nuance, again?
That's where he lost me.
When extremists hitch their wagon to an issue it doesn’t make the cause invalid. This should be obvious to any history buff, or, for that matter, anyone who has ever been part of a common cause:
(One moment you’re marching peacefully through the park with your sign when suddenly the Marxist-Leninists and the National Front decide to start bashing each other’s heads with theirs. There’s blood on the streets and mounted cops swinging their clubs).
WTF? I digressed. Excuse the flashback. Back to the viral video and my main point…
Moreover, insisting a particular position is the correct one because a recognized expert says so, without providing supporting evidence, is to become trapped in the logical fallacy called “appeal to authority.”
The discourse goes something like: “So-and-So (Phd) takes this stance so that’s what I think too.”
Who can blame us? The world is a complicated, often bewildering place and we can only know so much from our schooling and lived experience. Turning to those who’ve spent their careers studying a specific subject (bonus if they’re sane and civil) is not only logical — it’s the go-to method for navigating a wide range of thorny issues.
There’s just one caveat: experts often disagree.
Science, of course, has the scientific method and scientific consensus, the latter dictated by the quality and quantity of evidence published in peer-reviewed journals. As Jonathan Maloney notes scientific consensus “is absolutely not an opinion, survey, or popularity contest among scientists.” But nor is it absolute because science is under constant revision.
Guaranteed trouble arrives when private capital and profit become the sole drivers of innovation. As this Wired article shows, scandalous levels of manipulation, fabrication and suppression of scientific data and evidence are all too common. One only has to google “corruption of science” to appreciate the scale of corporate pressure, nepotism and scientific sleaze.
Though far from foolproof, science at least has safeguards to help shield against rigid ideologies that enforce orthodoxy and fraudsters masquerading as “experts.”
The humanities and social sciences may be less protected from shoddy thinking than the natural sciences — but broadly speaking experts of whatever ilk are susceptible to both conflict of interest and groupthink, just like non-experts.
Unfortunately there is no clear demarcation line between unbiased analysis and prejudice and between rational thought and thought control.
When someone on Twitter accused author and independent journalist, Matt Taibbi, of lacking “credentials” on the topic he was writing about, he tweeted back with sarcastic aplomb:
“We have CIA vets reporting on intelligence and foreign policy, ex-FBI agents on domestic protest, pharmaceutical executives explaining health policy, hedge funders on the market — it’s awesome!”
Here’s an inexpert notion: The more someone stands to gain by pushing a certain narrative and the more they stand to lose by changing course, the less risk they’re likely to take in terms of their reputation, career, finances etc.
As American author and muckraker, Upton Sinclair once quipped: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding."
It’s no mystery why whistle blowers are rare. Just look at what happened to Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning.
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