Why We Don’t Trust Experts

By now surely every reader is aware of the recent scandal at Harvard involving former president Claudine Gay. In a plot twist which surprised absolutely no one, a deeper investigation into the background of this particular diversity hire turned up quite a bit of academic plagiarism in her past. Despite trying to use her diversity cred to resist the calls for her resignation, she eventually ended up being out of her administrative position, but only because of the anti-Israel angle of her earlier statements before Congress (which in no wise substantiates certain, ahem, recurring stereotypes…). However, we should note that she is not out of a job by any means. Indeed, she still retains her professorship at Harvard because of her tenure.

This is a microcosm of American academia today (as well as that in much of the rest of the world). The standard for everything from whose research to fund to who to promote to lucrative, high level administrative positions is not based on merit, but on membership in various approved constituencies of the progressive intersectionality alliance. When serious issues involving honesty and academic integrity do arise, the concern isn’t so much the error itself, but whether “right wing White men” can use it to undermine progressive priorities such as affirmative action and DIE initiatives. However, the cat’s out of the bag and the academic plagiarism scandal is now threatening to widen to academics at large, especially with billionaire Bill Ackman going after MIT using artificial intelligence-driven LLMs designed to root out falsifications.

We shouldn’t really be surprised by any of this. Plagiarism is the domain of the midwit – people who don’t really have original thoughts of their own, no matter how highly they may think of themselves. And midwittery is increasingly what defines not just academia, but much of American society in general, as mediocrity rules the day. Further, we see a profusion of millions of written works of various types every year, from dime store novels to newspaper articles to academic papers. Back in “the old days” when writing for the consumption of others was less common, lifting someone else’s words was easier to observe. Nowadays its harder to detect plagiarism and other evidences of incompetence (without the help of sophisticated analytical tools) even as they become more widespread.

One explanation for the rise of midwittery and academic mediocrity in America directly connects to the “everybody should go to college” mantra that has become a common platitude. During the period of America’s rise to world superpower, going to college was reserved for a small minority of higher IQ Americans who attended under a relatively meritocratic regime. The quality of these graduates, however, was quite high and these were the “White men with slide rules” who built Hoover Dam, put a man on the moon, and could keep Boeing passenger jets from losing their doors halfway through a flight. As the bar has been lowered and the ranks of Gender and Queer Studies programs have been filled, the quality of college students has declined precipitously. One recent study shows that the average IQ of college students has dropped to the point where it is basically on par with the average for the general population as a whole.

Another area where this comes into play is with the replication crisis in science. For those who haven’t heard, the results from an increasingly large number of scientific studies, including many that have been used to have a direct impact on our lives, cannot be reproduced by other workers in the relevant fields. Obviously, this is a problem because being able to replicate other scientists’ results is sort of central to that whole scientific method thing. If you can’t do this, then your results really aren’t any more “scientific” than your Aunt Gertie’s internet searches.

As with other areas of increasing sociotechnical incompetency, some of this is diversity-driven. But not wholly so, by any means. Indeed, I’d say that most of it is due to the simple fact that bad science will always be unable to be consistently replicated. Much of this is because of bad experimental design and other technical matters like that. The rest is due to bad experimental design, etc., caused by overarching ideological drivers that operate on flawed assumptions that create bad experimentation and which lead to things like cherry-picking data to give results that the scientists (or, more often, those funding them) want to publish. After all, “science” carries a lot of moral and intellectual authority in the modern world, and that authority is what is really being purchased.

It’s no secret that Big Science is agenda-driven and definitely reflects Regime priorities. So whenever you see “New study shows the genetic origins of homosexuality” or “Latest data indicates trooning your kid improves their health by 768%,” that’s what is going on. REAL science is not on display. And don’t even get started on global warming, with its preselected, computer-generated “data” sets that have little reflection on actual, observable natural phenomena.

“Butbutbutbut this is all peer-reviewed!! 97% of scientists agree!!” The latter assertion is usually dubious, at best. The former, on the other hand, is irrelevant. Peer-reviewing has stopped being a useful measure for weeding out spurious theories and results and is now merely a way to put a Regime stamp of approval on desired result. But that’s okay because the “we love science” crowd flat out ignores data that contradict their presuppositions anywise, meaning they go from doing science to doing ideology (e.g. rejecting human biodiversity, etc.). This sort of thing was what drove the idiotic responses to COVID-19 a few years ago, and is what is still inducing midwits to gum up the works with outdated “science” that they’re not smart enough to move past.

If you want a succinct definition of “scientism,” it might be this – A belief system in which science is accorded intellectual abilities far beyond what the scientific method is capable of by people whose intellectual abilities are far below being able to understand what the scientific method even is.

This single factor, more than anything else, drives the simultaneous midwit exaltation and debasement of “science” as an intellectual activity. More generally, this “midwit effect” has destroyed the position which genuine competency should hold in our society by casting all claims to competency in doubt.

This gets to a root matter in modern American society, which is that normal people no longer trust experts to any great degree. If you think about it, this really shouldn’t be the case. Under normal circumstances, there really shouldn’t be a problem with trusting experts and indeed, it would be wise to do so. You should be able to trust that someone who spent eight years in medical school would have better solutions than some rando on YouTube. If someone was able to get through all of the coursework to obtain an engineering degree, you should be able to expect them to competently design an airplane or automobile.

But we can’t take that for granted anymore. Nobody trusts experts these days because there is a widespread (and correct) sense that experts are bought and paid for, that their expertise is mercenary, not altruistic. Coupled with this is the fact that many “experts” are where they are because of a combination of diversity hiring and a post-Civil Rights Act HR regimen that strongly selects against the type of personality that really makes for a competent, hyper-focused sperglord expert in a field.

As is often the case, this effect serves as both a cause for and a consequence of our on-going collapse. Collapse, like many other social phenomena, is multifaceted and mathematically complex. Certainly, our competency crisis is only one of many factors involved, but we ought to recognise it as a rather major one. Inability to manufacture what you need or to guarantee that large-scale systems like healthcare or transportation networks will continue to function effectively is going to go along way towards sociopolitical decomplexification.

The negative in all of this is, of course, that when these systems stop working, people’s overall well-being becomes measurably lower. However, clouds often have silver linings and so it is here. This ongoing competency collapse may just force people to fall back onto localist solutions, which in the long run will soften some of the effects of terminal collapse (our Seneca point, whatever it might end up being) and make our transition through into the next cycle somewhat easier. Either way, instead of pretending that these systems are truly fixable without complete dismantling and rebuilding (i.e. tanks on Harvard Yard really is likely to be the only way to “fix” Harvard), we should be hardening ourselves and our local systems against collapse and preparing to “restore competency” wherever we can.