Why Should We Trust the Experts?
Trust is a commodity in very short supply.
May 25, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
09:13
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| I watched the debate between Dave Green and Nathan Kofnes on the problem with our scientific institutions, mostly discussing academia as represented by the universities, the state and elite media outlets. | |
| Academia, as thus defined, is responsible for the scientific consensus, and we have a serious problem with how it has not only not been honest with us, but is instead deliberately lying to us on numerous politicised issues. | |
| Nathan's problem with this is that the platforming of non-experts to discuss subjects which require expertise is a thorny problem, as it can proliferate misinformation in ways which are not conducive to the public understanding of a subject. | |
| Whereas Dave's position revolves around the fact that having an unaccountable body of liturgical mouthpieces for the science is ripe for exploitation, and we have seen the consequences of such abuse very publicly in the past five years with dramatic effect. | |
| Nathan has a strong point in that we of course want competent people to determine how things actually work, and employing laymen to fill that role will allow avoidable mistakes to be made and lead to an accumulation of failure later down the line. | |
| He argues that just because they lied to us on certain big issues doesn't mean everything the experts say is incorrect, and just because an amateur may be accidentally correct on something doesn't mean we need to take their word for everything. | |
| This is trivially true, but misses the point of the discussion and the real problem with having academia ruled by lying experts. | |
| If the institutions were merely incompetent, it would be eminently preferable because we could at least begin the process of trial and error. | |
| If there was, say, a 50% chance that the institution would be wrong and inadvertently cause harm by its pronouncements, it isn't good, but at least future generations could benefit from our experience. | |
| Wisdom would have a chance to accrue through both parties acting honestly and in good faith, so lessons could be learned and passed on to future generations. | |
| However, when the institution is led by liars, this process is interrupted because now we have to play a game of cat and mouse, in which we attempt to catch the experts in their lies, but pretend as if that's not what we're doing, instead of simply calling the shot straight and dethroning them for being liars and replacing them with honest men. | |
| Their expertise isn't in question, at least initially. | |
| It is instead our access to this expertise that is the issue. | |
| Not only do we not know when they are lying to us about their specialist subjects, so we might not have access to accurate information, but this is compounded by questions of character and the wider ramifications for a society in which institutionalized lying becomes the norm. | |
| The fish rots from the head down, and suddenly a high-trust, low-corruption society becomes inverted into a low-trust, high-corruption society that masquerades in the flesh of its dead past. | |
| We are the experts, they say, and our expertise can be trusted. | |
| So not only do they lie to us, they lie to themselves, because the knowledge they do possess begins to depart from reality and takes on the form of an orthodoxy, drawing the institution further away from its intended purpose. | |
| If the institutions are permitted to be run by liars, and the experts routinely lie about major issues of high moral significance, why should we not expect that they might begin lying about issues of less pressing moral significance? | |
| Several scientific fields are currently in the grip of a replication crisis. | |
| Psychology, medicine, economics, political science and education are all struggling with the problem that many of the studies can't either be replicated or they have sensationalist publication bias, that is, the desire to be published and receive the applaudits of their peers, has led to a lack of integrity in the work that is produced. | |
| As Science Direct have put it, Sensational but potentially inaccurate claims were therefore left uncorrected in scientific journals. | |
| The accumulation of inaccurate research findings can cause harm when the literature leads professionals to use interventions that are unlikely to benefit their clients and or they may not have at their disposal the effective interventions necessary for positive client outcomes. | |
| In other words, a lack of scrupulous scientific practices are already creating an environment in which just ignoring the result is producing a cumulative weakness in the edifice of science itself. | |
| Not only are we arriving at the same position we might be at with the incompetent institutions led by honest people, but we are also burdened with the disadvantage of having them led by liars instead. | |
| This commitment to an external moral orthodoxy is the very reason the scientific revolution took place outside of the universities and why Francis Bacon called them distempers of learning. | |
| The scholastic obsession with faulty doctrine ensured that true learning and progress could not be made. | |
| The commitment to dogma compounded until eventually the institutions became worthless anyway. | |
| Moreover, in our particular circumstance, if the institution is governed by people who will happily lie for political gain, why should people beneath them not simply lie for convenience? | |
| The lie has been shown to be an acceptable thing in some circumstances, and it seems inevitable that it will be expanded for other circumstances based on the disposition of the liar. | |
| Put simply, if the institution cannot be trusted on some things, it means they cannot be trusted on anything. | |
| We do not know whether the people running it are telling the truth, lying for political gain, or lying because they didn't really do the work. | |
| The problem is that when people who run scientific institutions decide that they are going to prioritise moral questions that lay outside of the scope of science, they have also found themselves in a position where they can leverage one to satisfy the other. | |
| If they dedicate themselves to upholding something external using the power of the institution, then the institution itself becomes suspect because its purpose is no longer truth, it is orthodoxy. | |
| Moreover, politics is the management of power, so anyone who wields power must have external mechanisms through which they can be held accountable. | |
| We appear to be arriving in the unfortunate position where scientists have misaligned their goals with what is actually true and are now demanded by their own consciences to fudge the facts or leave out important data to maintain their moral rectitude. | |
| This requires them to manipulate people's perception of reality as mediated through the scientific establishment, demanding a dramatic increase in the power of the institution. | |
| The scientists in command of the institution are thereby now incentivized towards power-seeking behaviours rather than truth-seeking behaviours. | |
| And what kind of people do you think that's going to attract? | |
| As we saw during the pandemic, but in many other realms too, they will attempt to gain enormous totalitarian levels of power over society and use it to oppress people with no remorse whatsoever, using their scientific expertise as a justification for the imposition of a moral tyranny. | |
| We should not need to second-guess the experts when it comes to gaining access to relevant information. | |
| We shouldn't have to wonder if they are deliberately withholding key knowledge to ensure that we can make a decision one way and not another, or if they made their career lying their way through the institutions and don't actually possess true information to begin with. | |
| And if that has been done to us, then the people who did it should be severely punished, at the very least losing their livelihoods as an example to the rest. | |
| And if we don't punish them, we condemn ourselves to live in a society where gaining the rank of expert is a free ticket to wield power without accountability and will put us in a perpetual war against corrupted institutions which seek dominion rather than science. | |
| We do not wish to live in a society in which we accept as a matter of course that evil or venal people can trade on the good name of science as a path to unaccountable power and prosperity. |
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