Everyone is Ignorant, Only on Different Subjects.
I had Roger Koppl's Expert Failure along for reading the evening the DeKalb Municipal Band played a tune inspired by the Omaha Nation dividing itself into two sub-tribes, one responsible for the defense of the nation, the other with the spiritual health of the people. (There might have been something similar among the Tribes of Israel, but I'm not going to dig into the Old Testament to find book, chapter, and verse.) That's consistent with a working hypothesis of mine about the development of systems of governance.
Did the people who were less effective fighters agree to become servants, later subjects, of the more effective fighters? Did the people less attuned to the clues Nature provided for all to see agree to support the people more attuned as ambassadors to their gods? In that latter post I concluded, "I might be off base suggesting that the Technocratic Vision is contrary to longer term tendencies. I suggest, however, that some organizing framework is superior to none."
I'm going to restrict, to the extent I can, Book Review No. 12 to that part of Mr Koppl's argument where he develops a candidate organizing framework. That's challenging, as Expert Failure attempts to tackle all sorts of things. It is the sort of work for which the reader ought have strong coffee, pencil and a notepad, and time to read it and engage the challenging parts. Those attempts can be frustrating at times, as he is overworking the notion of "expert." Sometimes that refers to the term in the legal sense, in which, for example, the material witness is the investigating officer, or detective, who presents the relevant fingerprints to the court, while the expert witness shows the incriminating similarities between the fingerprints taken when the suspect is arrested and the fingerprints the crime scene investigators gathered (and provided the proper chain of custody). Other times that refers to the term in the way we refer to technocratic government, where the expert has special knowledge of some phenomenon, and the government makes policies either based on that knowledge, or with a delegation of authority to persons possessing that knowledge. I'm going to treat that understanding of "expert" as the principal focus of the work.
That's despite the discussion often wanders into interesting places. For instance, there's a passage from Bernard Mandeville about sailors being able to set a course without being burdened with any mathematical knowledge: no development, though, of the idea that a naval architect with the relevant mathematical knowledge might be able to give the sailor a better-performing boat. In like manner, the political economy of Expert Guidance is probably something the philosopher or political scientist understands as something different from the sort of expertise a good hitting coach or voice teacher deploys on behalf of the batter or the singer. I'm leaving all sorts of other asides from my marginal notes behind in preparing today's review.
On to the principal line of argument, dear reader. Expert Failure opens with "Whatever one's opinion of Trump or the European Union, ordinary people in Western democracies have cause to be angry with experts." The book appeared in 2018, before the corona tyranny, and yet, apologists for Business as Usual still seem baffled that the Professional-Managerial Class and its High Modern Authoritarianism are in a bad odor. “Anti-intellectualism became a common fixture in the subsequent campaigns of Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Trump to convey a stance of strong leadership and instinct not reliant on established experts while decision making.” That's because we've seen what those established experts have done.
We now know a lot more about emergent systems than we did a century ago, and there have been enough blunders in theoretical and applied social science in the intervening years that the prudent academician understands why an explanation for a phenomenon is not the same as a justification for a policy. Hold that thought for future reference.
The self-styled progressives of a century ago were not yet that modest. In order that the Wise Experts have the authority to identify the common good, it must be the case that anyone not a Wise Expert is unqualified to so identify. Then only the Wise Experts can Fix Things.
Unfortunately, they can't.
Oh, I was reviewing a book, wasn't I? In the same way that emergent commercial and political orders are robust in a way that imposed orders are not, emergent knowledge is robust in a way that hierarchically imposed knowledge is not. That's summarized at page 116.
We need some understanding of where expertise comes from. The social division of knowledge was not designed and imposed from above by a knowledge elite. It emerged spontaneously as the unintended consequence of many individual choices aiming at local ends and not any overall design for the system. The division of knowledge is a spontaneous order. It is bottom up and not top down. The theory of expert failure may go wrong if it does not begin with this bottom-up understanding of the social division of knowledge.
I'm treating that passage as the main message. Although excursions into all sorts of other topics follow, he returns, at page 234, to the bet on emergence. "My theory is based on a radically egalitarian model of knowledge. In this antihierarchical model, knowledge is... synecological, evolutionary, exosomatic, constitutive, and tacit." At the risk of oversimplifying, emergent knowledge is likely to be more useful than knowledge handed out by authority figures. "Imposing knowledge from above ensures expert failure." Put a mask on that, and only two beers a week.
A secondary instructive message is in his anthill metaphor, an idea with a pedigree of long standing. The Social Theorist might think himself as in the position of the Anteater, observing the anthill and performing surgery to correct "nervous disorders of the colony by the technique of surgical removal," to quote Douglas Hofstadter, but the Social Theorist is still an ant in the hill, and when he treats his frame of analysis as the only frame, page 236, "knowledge of the other ants, that is, of the expert's fellow humans, falls mostly out of view and becomes entirely irrelevant." Thus, in the absence of a healthy level of epistemic humility, focussed experts lead, inevitably, to nervous disorders of the colony, which is to say, all manner of expert failures. The nervous disorders are more severe, he suggests, the more authority and the more monopoly power the Designated Experts have.
Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.
Did the people who were less effective fighters agree to become servants, later subjects, of the more effective fighters? Did the people less attuned to the clues Nature provided for all to see agree to support the people more attuned as ambassadors to their gods? In that latter post I concluded, "I might be off base suggesting that the Technocratic Vision is contrary to longer term tendencies. I suggest, however, that some organizing framework is superior to none."
I'm going to restrict, to the extent I can, Book Review No. 12 to that part of Mr Koppl's argument where he develops a candidate organizing framework. That's challenging, as Expert Failure attempts to tackle all sorts of things. It is the sort of work for which the reader ought have strong coffee, pencil and a notepad, and time to read it and engage the challenging parts. Those attempts can be frustrating at times, as he is overworking the notion of "expert." Sometimes that refers to the term in the legal sense, in which, for example, the material witness is the investigating officer, or detective, who presents the relevant fingerprints to the court, while the expert witness shows the incriminating similarities between the fingerprints taken when the suspect is arrested and the fingerprints the crime scene investigators gathered (and provided the proper chain of custody). Other times that refers to the term in the way we refer to technocratic government, where the expert has special knowledge of some phenomenon, and the government makes policies either based on that knowledge, or with a delegation of authority to persons possessing that knowledge. I'm going to treat that understanding of "expert" as the principal focus of the work.
That's despite the discussion often wanders into interesting places. For instance, there's a passage from Bernard Mandeville about sailors being able to set a course without being burdened with any mathematical knowledge: no development, though, of the idea that a naval architect with the relevant mathematical knowledge might be able to give the sailor a better-performing boat. In like manner, the political economy of Expert Guidance is probably something the philosopher or political scientist understands as something different from the sort of expertise a good hitting coach or voice teacher deploys on behalf of the batter or the singer. I'm leaving all sorts of other asides from my marginal notes behind in preparing today's review.
On to the principal line of argument, dear reader. Expert Failure opens with "Whatever one's opinion of Trump or the European Union, ordinary people in Western democracies have cause to be angry with experts." The book appeared in 2018, before the corona tyranny, and yet, apologists for Business as Usual still seem baffled that the Professional-Managerial Class and its High Modern Authoritarianism are in a bad odor. “Anti-intellectualism became a common fixture in the subsequent campaigns of Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Trump to convey a stance of strong leadership and instinct not reliant on established experts while decision making.” That's because we've seen what those established experts have done.
We now know a lot more about emergent systems than we did a century ago, and there have been enough blunders in theoretical and applied social science in the intervening years that the prudent academician understands why an explanation for a phenomenon is not the same as a justification for a policy. Hold that thought for future reference.
The self-styled progressives of a century ago were not yet that modest. In order that the Wise Experts have the authority to identify the common good, it must be the case that anyone not a Wise Expert is unqualified to so identify. Then only the Wise Experts can Fix Things.
Unfortunately, they can't.
Oh, I was reviewing a book, wasn't I? In the same way that emergent commercial and political orders are robust in a way that imposed orders are not, emergent knowledge is robust in a way that hierarchically imposed knowledge is not. That's summarized at page 116.
We need some understanding of where expertise comes from. The social division of knowledge was not designed and imposed from above by a knowledge elite. It emerged spontaneously as the unintended consequence of many individual choices aiming at local ends and not any overall design for the system. The division of knowledge is a spontaneous order. It is bottom up and not top down. The theory of expert failure may go wrong if it does not begin with this bottom-up understanding of the social division of knowledge.
I'm treating that passage as the main message. Although excursions into all sorts of other topics follow, he returns, at page 234, to the bet on emergence. "My theory is based on a radically egalitarian model of knowledge. In this antihierarchical model, knowledge is... synecological, evolutionary, exosomatic, constitutive, and tacit." At the risk of oversimplifying, emergent knowledge is likely to be more useful than knowledge handed out by authority figures. "Imposing knowledge from above ensures expert failure." Put a mask on that, and only two beers a week.
A secondary instructive message is in his anthill metaphor, an idea with a pedigree of long standing. The Social Theorist might think himself as in the position of the Anteater, observing the anthill and performing surgery to correct "nervous disorders of the colony by the technique of surgical removal," to quote Douglas Hofstadter, but the Social Theorist is still an ant in the hill, and when he treats his frame of analysis as the only frame, page 236, "knowledge of the other ants, that is, of the expert's fellow humans, falls mostly out of view and becomes entirely irrelevant." Thus, in the absence of a healthy level of epistemic humility, focussed experts lead, inevitably, to nervous disorders of the colony, which is to say, all manner of expert failures. The nervous disorders are more severe, he suggests, the more authority and the more monopoly power the Designated Experts have.
Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.