We hear a lot about experts. But what makes someone an expert? A lot of education? Good guesses? A really fast computer that can run complex simulations with lightning speed? Sure, all of these help, but what REALLY matters is who is calling you an expert. A note: there are several Wikipedia links in this post and I’m not normally a fan, but for basic informational purposes about the people I’m talking about I don’t think it’s too great a sin. Onward!
If you have the ear of corporate media, establishment tech and/or pharmaceutical companies, politicians and their staff, academia, or lifer government bureaucrats, you can and will be considered an expert if you say what they want to hear, pretty much regardless of your actual credentials or your results. If they want fear and you can make a terrifying prediction, you’re in the club! If you make a fearmongering statement that goes viral, it doesn’t matter if it isn’t the truth, because very few people will believe (or even see) the correction.
And once you’re in, it takes a lot of bad guesses to get kicked out. Unless you do something else that’s forbidden, that is. Take Neil Ferguson, who, despite being a naughty boy and stepping down from his role as an advisor to the UK government officially, and various governments un-or-quasi-officially, continues to wield influence among the “respectable” scientific community, despite flipping and flopping (sorry for the paywall link but even the first bit is illustrative) more than a serious scientist should, in my opinion. And that’s a major part of the issue; they speak with authority from a place of intellectual ignorance and use their credentials as a cudgel against dissenters, and entire governments go along with their advice, as long as they get what they want out of it.
And this is not new. When Ancel Keys put forward his dietary advice, which comes to some very good conclusions about a healthy diet despite the mechanism for doing so being wrong, he used his influence to destroy people just as “expert” as he was, because they went against the orthodoxy we wished to establish. John Yudkin was attacked, discredited, and then ignored, and only recently has his research been getting a fair hearing once again. However, the damage has been done; once bureaucrats got ahold of dietary guidelines, and subsidies started to flow, inertia set in and it will take a lot to undo the damage. Not to say that either one of them had done perfect science, but both of them deserved to be heard so others could follow along, refine their methods, and get ever closer to truth.
Let me be the first to say that I have not studied the specialties that these people have, but I am open to listening to credentialed experts that disagree with them, judging their arguments, and seeing who makes a better case. Skeptics simply ask if a purported expert is sure of their conclusions before we make major changes to our way of life and they act as if the very act of seeking truth is being questioned, and that is unbelievably dangerous. We’re still finding out how much damage has been done to us by advice given in the 50s and 60s, and we’ve been making major changes to how we live and what goes on and in us the entire time, as well. It’s going to take a long time to sort out all the bad advice from the good, and also to even know what advice is bad and good for which people, because we all react to our environment as individuals.
Which brings up one last point I want to make; we don’t know very much at all about the human body. I predict that in another 30 years we’ll look back on our medical industry much like Bones McCoy looked at the 1980s-era doctors in Star Trek IV. But I seriously doubt anyone will be held to account for legislating harmful policies and encouraging poor food choices on people for several decades, because the blame will always be passed; the experts will blame lack of information, and the legislators will blame the scientists for coming to the wrong conclusion. Then the bureaucrats will shrug and say that they were only doing what the law decreed, and no one stops to ask “what if they just DID NOTHING instead and let people decide how best to live their lives?” I’d wager the results would be no worse, and I personally think significantly better.
